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Pricking the Conscience of Churches: From AIDS Activism to Ending World Hunger

By Susan Henking

…ly sputter when you counter with that argument! As an active leader in the United Methodist Church who, as you mentioned, has served as Chair of the United Methodist Global AIDS Fund Committee. How do you see your own path or that of the Methodist Church in this regard? Or, as has been asked elsewhere—what would Wesley do? United Methodists are no different than other Christians. We struggle and fail to deal with issues of human sexuality too. The…

Christianity and Condoms

By John Blevins

…he country’s constitution states that Zambia is a Christian nation. In the United States, Christianity provides a number of mechanisms to underwrite abstinence and to support people who abstain in their identity as abstainers—theological texts, biblical interpretations, True Love Waits youth rallies, weighty traditions, and ethical arguments. These mechanisms do not merely reinforce this identity in the United States. They are part of the preventi…

Does Record Number of Religious “Nones” Mean Decline of Religiosity?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ll us much about American religiosity—about religion as it is lived in the United States today? A number of what I would see as problems in the Pew report suggest to me that our growing fixation with religion-by-the-numbers may be distracting us from richer, more nuanced understandings of American religious practice. Wanted: A Community that Doesn’t Share My Beliefs and Values Take the demographic category of “Nones” itself. The Pew report notes…

Holey Holey Holey: The Problem with a New Study Valuing Religion at $1.2 Trillion Per Year

By Michael Schulson

…f the total revenue of American religious congregations. To get that final number, the Grims took one estimate of the total number of congregations in America (344,894) and multiplied it by another estimate of the average revenue of each ($242,910). Depending on how you look at it, $378 billion is a lot of money, or it’s not very much money at all. It’s more than the net worth of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet, combined…

Competing Visions of Family & Freedom at UN; Methodists Try to Avoid Schism on Sexuality; Catholic Cardinal Denounces LGBT ‘Demonic Ideology’; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…request for a permit by saying they could not guarantee activists’ safety United Methodist Church: Bishops create commission to avoid schism over sexuality issues The United Methodist Church, whose global policy-making body met May 10-20 in its quadrennial General Conference, is “struggling to avoid a split over gay rights,” according to Associated Press religion writer Rachel Zoll. The church has 12 million members worldwide, 7 million of those…

Racial Justice Will Be Top Priority for New Prez of the United Church of Christ

By Frederick Clarkson

…n between this Church and other bodies, there shall arise a more inclusive United Church.” We don’t know if the United Church of Christ is called to die as an institution; but if it is, it will do so called by the Holy Spirit to create space for what may emerge for the sake of a movement we committed to being wholly a part of. What we do know is that this impulse towards an organic unity, fully reflective of what was intended by Jesus when he pray…

Six Overlooked Gems from the Future of World Religions Report

By Timothy King

…also not clear if being “unaffiliated” really means the same thing in the United States as elsewhere. Take that earlier number of 68% of the “unaffiliated” believing in God or a higher power in the United States. That drops to 30% in France (233). According to that previous Pew research, one reason more people identify as “unaffiliated” now is that people who used to skip church and not really believe anything in particular simply felt a social p…

Exclusion is Causing Great Harm: A Conversation With Suspended UMC Pastor Rev. Cynthia Meyer

By Joel Pitney

…riends. I have a daughter who is 21, and she really has no interest in the United Methodist Church at this point. That’s a sad loss. So many people who might otherwise be attracted to the United Methodist Church—with its care for the larger world and commitment to social justice—are put off by the stance on these issues. Those who are LGBT, or who have family members or people important to them who are LGBT (and that includes about everybody), now…

Who’s Scared of Polygamy? A Restrained Case for the “Slippery Slope” Argument

By William E. Smith

…e-land in just a few short decades. The ascent of same-sex marriage in the United States gained much (but not all) of its initial support from churches. Many local Universalist Unitarian (UU), Disciples of Christ, and United Church of Christ (UCC) congregations, and some Episcopal churches, for example, started blessing same-sex unions as far back as the 1970s, as work by Heather White and Mark Jordan has shown. Over the years the debate and activ…

Contraception Isn’t Meat

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…ario, Jains run a number of large institutions with many employees, a high number of whom are not Jain. At some point, a number of people realize that the current system is a complicated and inefficient way to feed people, and so there are attempts at reforming the system. One of the questions that the would-be reformers have to consider is: What do most people, in fact, eat? That’s important, because they are trying to craft a system that takes i…