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World Congress of Families Blessed By Georgian Orthodox Patriarch and George W. Bush; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…onvenes its quadrennial General Conference in Portland, Oregon. From May 10-20, more than 800 delegates will debate changes to church policy, including several that seek to lift longstanding bans on LGBT ministers and same-sex marriages. This is the first Methodist General Conference since the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in 2015. LGBT-affirming Methodists have failed to change church policy, with the denomination’s numerical strength now…

Racist Remarks by popular BYU Religion Professor Spark Controversy

By Joanna Brooks

…od ban—linking it to Old Testament 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 centurie…

The C Word

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ot challenge their faith. Christians who congregate in offices of only like-minded people can soon become hardened in their beliefs – feeling no compassion for those around them who may think differently, act differently, or believe differently. Any person of faith needs to be out in the world – challenged by the things they see, broken-hearted by the world’s suffering, reaching out to those who are in need, no matter how their beliefs may differ….

Are School Districts Getting the Message on Government-Sponsored Prayer?

By Lauri Lebo

…Freedom from Religion Foundation this week on behalf of students from Soddy-Daisy High School, Scales sent an e-mail to all local principals on Tuesday, saying the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled prayer before football games and graduation ceremonies to be unconstitutional and that the practices should be stopped. “But things are handled a little differently in different areas of the country,” Scales said. “This does not need to be something that div…

Mormon Bloggernacle is No Choir

By Krista Kapralos

…ademics, defending Times and Seasons, By Common Consent, and other doctrine-focused blogs, complained that the Bloggernacle had been co-opted, while Mormon mommy bloggers (women who write primarily about home life and children) and lifestyle bloggers retorted that they are marginalized by the academics, despite having blogs that rank among the most popular on the Web. It was a Bloggergate. “I get so irritated by the dismissive, uninformed male blo…

The Fire This Time

By Anthea Butler

…and inclusion, the documents that excluded me and called my ancestors three-fifths of a person. You figure it out. I’m about comforting Black people now. We need each other. I can’t help you feel less guilty about maintaining a violent, racist, gun-obsessed nation called America. As for you black folks calling out to Jesus, hoping for redemption, I envy you. You can sing the gospel songs, and hope for redemption. I don’t see it coming. I see fire….

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

By Peter Montgomery

…aboo. Since then a growing acceptance of gays and lesbians has arrived hand-in-hand with a flourishing economy.” But it’s not just him. In what the Polish media are calling “the Biedron effect,” a record number of candidates also came out publicly before the local elections, which took place in two rounds over the last two weeks. None of the others won seats, but gay rights activists are still hugely encouraged by the change. Their poor showing ca…

Something So Broken: What’s Frightening About Beasts of the Southern Wild

By Michael Pasquier

…the applause is directed at the film’s heroine, Quvenzhané Wallis, the six-year-old non-professional actor who grew up in a Louisiana bayou town and who may soon become the youngest Academy Award nominee of all time. Sharing much of the admiration, and the object of much of the criticism, is the film’s director, co-writer, and composer, Benh Zeitlin, a Queens native and graduate of Wesleyan University, where he formed a filmmaking collective call…

Thoreau’s Ferocious Critique of Philanthropy Does Not Make Him “Selfish”

By Alda Balthrop-Lewis

…n to relieve.” He went on to use a striking analogy, “It is the pious slave-breeder devoting the proceeds of every tenth slave to buy a Sunday’s liberty for the rest.” Slave-breeder is, of course, a polite term for one who perpetrated sexual violence upon enslaved people and then sold their children. Readers who shared his abolitionist leanings would have recognized the hypocrisy of “the pious slave-breeder.” Thoreau’s point was that the capitalis…

Colorado’s Personhood Initiative Fails—For Now

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…consideration for the woman. To be sure, neither rape exceptions nor life-of-the-mother exceptions really make a lot of sense if you truly think that a fertilized embryo is a rights-bearing human being. But a life-of-the-mother exception, without a rape exception, gives a pretty clear picture of where the pregnant woman’s welfare fits into the picture. It’s saying, in essence: “Is being pregnant going to actually directly literally kill her? No?…