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Why The Book of Mormon (the Musical) is Awesomely Lame

By Jared Farmer

…y’s zingers about 19-year-old Mormon “elders” fall on target. A surprising number of these Christian soldiers haven’t in fact read the Book of Mormon (“Another Testament of Jesus Christ”). Pairs of missionaries (“companions”) do often resent each other; sexual tension, homophobia, homesickness, and boredom strain the relationships of these co-workers/roommates. Many missionaries dislike their geographic assignments. Even as they compete against ea…

End-Times Watcher Sees Satan in an Energy Drink

By William R. Black

…The author of Revelation meant that 666 was a person’s name turned into a number via the Jewish numerological practice of gematria. Since every Hebrew letter was also a number, the letters of a name could be added up to produce that person’s number. Here’s an example of gematria using an alphabet we’re more familiar with, the Roman alphabet. Say someone’s name was Vic. Each letter in his name is also a Roman numeral. V=5, I=1, C=100. Using gematr…

Lifestyles of the Rich and Pious

By Patricia Miller

…t social justice issues, lives alone in a charming three-story brick Victorian home valued at $3.84 million. • Baltimore Archbishop William Lori, head of the bishop’s Committee on Religious Liberty—the epicenter of the church’s opposition to same-sex marriage and the contraception mandate—and the man supposedly behind the investigation of the LCWR, lives in a 11,5000-square foot historic mansion that dates back to the first Catholic bishop of the…

What Coverage of a Fatal Orthodox Baptism Reveals About Western Media

By Katherine Kelaidis

…ing a petition urging the Romanian church to change its practice. The Romanian Patriarch has said no such changes will occur. But neither the incident (no matter how tragic) nor the reaction (no matter how expected) is what I’m interested in here. What interests me is how differently the incident has been reported in the Western media than in traditionally Orthodox countries, and the ways in which this difference reveals the limits of the conversa…

The Radical Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Left’s Challenge Today

By Peter Laarman

…tives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered… America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There…

Rep. Cleaver’s ‘Awoman’ Prayer Enrages Christian Nationalists Who Taste Their Own Medicine and Still Miss the Point

By Andrew L. Seidel

…ural lines and stems from the a long tradition of pushing back against patriarchal Christianity. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton was fighting for women’s equality, she wrote an 1896 essay entitled, “The Degraded Status of Woman in the Bible.” The title says it all, but Stanton was never one to equivocate: “So far from woman owing what liberty she does enjoy to the Bible and the church, they have been the greatest block in the way of her development.”…

The Burning Houses of Worship We Missed

By Gordon Haber

…ad throughout Central and East Asia. More than 11 million Uighurs live in Xianjiang District of Western China, where officials have reportedly bulldozed over 800 mosques. Authorities have also detained hundreds of thousands of Uighurs in re-education camps. The scale of the suffering is difficult to imagine. In fairness, there’s been a lot of good reporting about the plight of the Uighurs. And yet I believe the outpouring of emotion for more recog…

Why #FreeBritney is an #Exvangelical Cause

By R.L. Stollar

…hooling movement, and who is (full disclosure) a friend. Grace wrote on social media that Spears’s conservatorship is “evangelicals’ dream of what to do with all of us backslidden daughters.” When I asked her to expand on her comment she told me, “A conservatorship for a functioning adult just seems like a logical extension of a belief system that gives unparalleled authority to fathers.” Grace continued: “Evangelicalism is a patriarchal system wi…

Violent, Genocidal Anti-Palestinian Rhetoric Moving to US?

By David Sheen

…t confined to religious sectors of society, but are also flourishing on social media platforms, where average Israelis call for Palestinians to be ethnically-cleansed. In the streets of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Beersheba, groups of Israeli Jews led by anti-miscegenationist activists march through town chanting “Death to Arabs!” and “Death to leftists!,” assaulting anyone who fits the bill. Until Israel’s most recent assault on Gaza, Jewish lead…

Gambian Leaders Portray Anti-Gay Law as Defense of Islam, Ugandan Politicians as ‘Christmas Gift’; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…by both Minister of State in the Ministry of Gender and Child Development Raziah Ahmed, and Opposition MP Marlene McDonald, both of whom shared the Archbishop’s sentiments.” ‘All children have the right to care, love, support and interventions where needed in keeping with the rights of the child,’ Ahmed told Newsday. ‘I don’t think that anybody should be thrown out because of their sexual orientation,’ McDonald said, ‘Not at all.’ ‘I do not subscr…