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First U.S. Visit of the Virgin Mary Confirmed in Wisconsin

By Lewis Wallace

…e United States, and immigrants from Catholic countries may be pushing the numbers up. As a symbol of Catholic catechesis, and as a representative of a seemingly humbler, more educated past, Adele may have a chance to make her mark. If she does, the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help will need some visitor accommodations—like a parking lot. It might look to Lourdes to improve its website: on the official site for the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes,…

Indonesian Court Rejects Religious Conservatives’ Bid To Criminalize Gay Sex; More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…es about sexual diversity in schools and even volunteered to help burn all books related to the subject. The ban was implemented in October after the United Nations Children’s Fund issued a guidebook for teachers on avoiding discrimination between girls and boys and achieving gender equality. “We’re not going to promote gender ideology,” Education Minister Enrique Riera told local media earlier this year. “We’re going to base ourselves on what is…

Are You There God? It’s Us, Googling

By Michael Schulson

…ion in “Google searches for churches,” yet more evidence of the increasing number of “nones,” or that “searches related to the Bible, God, Jesus Christ, church and prayer are all highly concentrated in the Bible Belt. They rise on Sunday everywhere.” Other patterns are more jarring: “Relative to the rest of the country, for every search I looked at, retirement communities search more about hell,” he writes. Each month, on average, 422 people in th…

Can the Catholic Church Survive Trump?

By Patricia Miller

…administration and the mandate. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of white Catholics who said the Obama administration was “unfriendly to religion” more than doubled from 17 percent to 36 percent between 2009 and 2014. And starting around 2012, white Catholics broke for the GOP by historic margins. It’s also worth noting, as Michael Sean Winters has, that this occurred around the time the administrative staff of the bishops’ confer…

A Debate Rages in India Over Conversion, Secularism, and “Spiritual Violence”

By Murali Balaji

…it is having on the Indian social fabric. It’s a conversation Uganda and a number of African nations have not had—which is having devastating consequences for the their LGBT communities. As scholar and social activist Jim Perkinson has reminded us, countries such as India are only a microcosm of the worldwide impact of missionary activity. “The effect on native people of predatory proselytization is typically cultural alienation, a growing sense o…

False Saviors: Trump, Cruz, and the Gospel of the Quick Fix

By Marcia Pally

…sons not in the labor force is growing. While some are getting richer, the numbers tell us, middle income earners are hobbled by shrinking purchasing power, disappearing job opportunities, and increasingly out-of-reach education. This is problem enough for the many who work hard and can’t figure out why they’re “losing ground,” as Pew wrote. Add to that fears of terrorism. People want relief. But if no solution presents itself, either lassitude or…

And What of the Non-Jewish Jews?

By Shaul Magid

…ancestry generations ago, a Jewish spouse, Jewish friends etc. In terms of numbers, Jews by religion or no religion make up 2.2% of the U.S. population, but if you add “People with a Jewish affinity” it rises to 2.7%, so that this category of people who are not considered Jews by the Jewish community but identify as Jews is nearly 25% of the Jews by religion or no religion, those we conventionally call “Jews.” The fact that there are so many Ameri…

There’s Something Rotten in Ireland

By Haroon Moghul

…nt post on Jesus seems especially insensitive, considering who it is being directed to and where it is apparently originating. A number of Palestinians are Christians, and that Christianity is of course traced back to the time of Jesus himself. The Palestinian weekend is Friday and Sunday. In addition to being the world’s most annoying and dissatisfying weekend schedule (there should be an award for that, or maybe financial compensation), the days…

Picasso’s Sacred Monster Eats Chicago: A Mystery Solved?

By Jeremy Biles

…tive interpretation. Multiply ambiguous, it is a strange concoction of any number of animal and human forms, as well as a sphinx; itself a hybrid monster. Moreover, the Chicago Picasso intimates both the Egyptian and Greek sphinxes—an amalgam of cultural styles. An ambiguous, almost inscrutable object, it is an enigmatic icon and the icon of an enigma; its very presence confronts the populace with a riddle. The riddle is not simply what the Chicag…