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Data-Mining The Denominations: The Southern Baptists in Four Charts

By Daniel Schultz

…hy, you need to know something about geography. In short, they call it the Southern Baptist Convention for a reason. The church is centered in 11 southern states: Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, North and South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas. That won’t be a surprise to most Americans, but the extent to which the SBC depends on this “base” might be: since 1950, about 75-80 percent of the total membership has…

Argue-by-Number: A Suggestion for the Church

By Mark D. Jordan

…n our side. Number 1 could be “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Number 2: “God doesn’t discriminate.” Number 3: “Sex is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arguments. This would allow long series of arguments to be cited b…

Francis Visits the Church that John Paul Broke

By Patricia Miller

…umber of marriages within the church has declined by nearly half. Only the number of Catholic funerals has held steady. And while the number of Catholics overall has remained level, that’s largely due to Hispanic migration to the US; some 40 percent of those born Catholic have left the church. But numbers don’t tell the whole story. The church Francis will encounter is fundamentally different in character from the church of John Paul in two import…

The Sacred and the Dead: Operator, Can You Help Me?

By Maren Haynes

…connection, once burning with possibility and joy, began to cool, as cell phone calls dwindled and numbers eventually changed or were disconnected. As our shared realities drifted apart in their likeness, like Pigpen, I also turned to technologies that promised connection to try to tamp down the yearning and temper that sense of loss. Where Pigpen called up the trusty telephone operator, I did my pining alone, with only the camaraderie of a searc…

A Jewish Perspective on Reparations

By Moriel Rothman-Zecher

…g, then one can see their fruits in Germany today. Last month, following a number of horrid, hateful slogans chanted at Jews (in the context of otherwise legitimate protests against Israel’s attack on Gaza), and a number of violent incidents, there was a large public vigil in Berlin to protest anti-Semitism. Among the attendees were German President Joachim Guack, members of Germany’s parliament, leaders of both of the country’s major churches, an…

Catholic Leaders Offer Criticism, Support to Boxer Pacquiao After Anti-Gay Comments…

By Peter Montgomery

…lationship that just made sense.” Bishop Joseph also recognizes that LGBTI Africans and LGBTI African Americans share a common antagonist in the conservative religious right of the United States. While this group continues to oppose public policies in the U.S. “that would benefit low-income people, which we think would also benefit black and brown people,” they are also working against LGBTI rights abroad because they feel they have lost the cultu…

Black Churches are Burning: Is It the 1990s All Over Again?

By Katie Day

…by arson or bombing in two and a half years. One third were predominantly African American churches in the south. They were able to get civil rights convictions for racial hate crimes in 60 percent of the cases in five Southern states and Nevada. In subsequent years, the numbers fell: there were 209 church arsons in 1997 and 166 the following year, according to their annual reports. The last report was issued in 2001. Altogether there were almost…

No Conspiracy Theories Needed: Abortion Foes Cry Racism

By Kathryn Joyce

…didate of the far-right Constitution Party, a group that, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, has ties to white supremacist organizations. Regardless of these clunky historical facts, Obama’s presidency and the GOP’s dismaying efforts to appeal to “the hip-hop generation” appear to have prompted resurgent interest in these arguments as a race-conscious update to the anti-abortion message. Since late December, a number of anti-abortion or…

Racist Hanukkah

By Anthea Butler

…eaches continue without questions and scrutiny? How will they respond when African Americans begin to ask questions about the treatment of African refugees in Israel? The issue of immigration for many nations, including Israel, is fraught. When the immigration issue becomes racialized, it escalates to a whole other level. Add religion, and the mix only becomes that much more volatile. While the Holy Land may hold a special place in the hearts of m…

Racist Remarks by popular BYU Religion Professor Spark Controversy

By Joanna Brooks

…ment pretexts, or to moral infirmity in a pre-earthly life by the souls of Africans and African-Americans, and other racist apologetic mental gymnastics exemplified in Bott’s statement to the Post—persist and circulate, generally unquestioned and unchallenged. For its part, the LDS Church has never authoritatively addressed racist theologies developed in defense of the ban in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead, it has attempted t…