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Faith and Football: What the Gospel Church Can Learn from the NFL

By Douglas Harrison

…thinking about sexuality in gospel music. For perhaps the first time in the 14-year history of the Super Bowl Gospel Celebration, there is a real reason to note meaningful discontinuities between the dominant views on homosexuality of the gospel concert’s headliners, and prevailing attitudes toward non-heterosexuality at the leading edge of NFL culture. It’s probably too much to call the NFL open and affirming (there are still no openly gay NFL pl…

Religious Resistance to Bolivian Gender Law; US Religious Right Celebrates Court OK For Romanian Marriage Initiative; Will LGBTs Be Banned from Indonesian TV?; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ing, and deriding their sexuality. The United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951 established that individuals with a “well-founded fear of being persecuted” based on membership of a “particular social group” are entitled to seek asylum abroad. Today, homosexuality is illegal in nearly 80 countries, and at the time of the convention, it was still illegal in Australia, the UK, most of the United States, and most of Europe—in Australia and other form…

Is The Episcopal Church Driving Drunk?

By J. Terry Todd

…ld-line denomination, right-wing detractors are correct in noting that the numbers are grim and the future far from bright. The question is, why? Why has this once-powerful church, with unmatched cultural capital and an impressive treasury, become so anemic? The answer is surely more complicated than the simple right-wing Anglican formula that liberalism = death. But let’s face it: this has been a tough few months for the Episcopal Church, and the…

Will the Taliban Actually Remain Somewhat Moderate This Time?

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…ddenly retreat during the fall of Saigon. During that memorable scramble in 1975, US diplomats had to evacuate the embassy via helicopters that landed on the roof as the North Vietnamese army tanks literally broke down the Embassy gates. The airport was out of commission since the North Vietnamese military had attacked it, and in fact the last American soldiers to lose their lives in the war were defending the airport. After that last helicopter f…

Why Belief in the Primacy of Language Leads to a Misunderstanding of Richard Dawkins, Islamophobia, and Politics

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…ty, Evolution, and Power Donovan O. Schaefer Duke University Press November 13, 2015 The way that affect theory functions, on the other hand, more closely resembles macroeconomics, which shows how small things like individual economic choices aggregate into giant dynamic forces, which then loop back and shape individual experiences. Except the currency of affect theory is emotion, which scholars have broken up into much smaller elements like backg…

From Organized Religion to Organizing Religion: Brian D. McLaren Wants Christians to Be Better

By Peter Laarman

…ple like Brian McLaren are still trying to crack it. McLaren, the author of 15 previous books and tireless lecturer and movement-builder, is the very best of the progressive evangelicals associated with the Red Letter Christians group: a group that includes Jim Wallis, Tony Campolo, Ron Sider, Shane Claiborne, Lisa Sharon Harper, and others. McLaren has also been very active in the formation of a newer initiative called the Convergence, which is s…

Mexican Marriage Marches Show Struggle Between Church and Secular State; Pro-LGBT Mormon Group Grows After ‘Apostate’ Declaration; Botswana Gives Anti-Gay US Pastor the Boot; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ic Church, which opposes such unions. Chile, which returned to democracy in 1990 after a brutal 17-year military dictatorship, is by many measures Latin America’s most economically developed country, but is less socially progressive than many of its neighbors. In 2004, it became the last country in the Western Hemisphere to legalize divorce, and it is one of the few that still outlaws abortions in all cases – something that center-left Bachelet is…

My Congregation Tried to Help a Syrian Family Settle in the US

By Thomas Warming

…It does make me wonder, though, what would happen if this family got their flight waivers tomorrow and showed up next week. Would they be redirected to Connecticut like the family turned away from Indiana this week? Would they face open hostility, suspicion, even violence, as Muslims in many states have? Would my parishioners still want to befriend them, or would they be cowed or converted by the mean-spirited rhetoric that has been flying loose r…

In Case You Missed Them, the Top Pope Francis Quotes of 2016

By Patricia Miller

…He referenced a decision by Pope Paul VI to allow nuns in the Congo in the 1960s to use contraceptives because they ran a risk of being raped, but refused to extend the analogy to other situations where a woman becoming pregnant might not be desirable (or desired). A pastor cannot feel that it is enough to simply apply moral laws to those living in ‘irregular’ situations, as if they were stones to throw at people’s lives. –In the long-awaited apo…

Dear Readers: Letter From an Anonymous Liberal Pastor in Trump Country

By Thomas Warming

…the light comes again. We’re going to be okay, I think. But I’m still going to call the ACLU and give them my congregants’ exact flight information. Just in case….