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The Dark Side of Our Obsession With Trapped Thai Children

By Edward E. Curtis IV

…ated one of these tragedies; we created the other one. The media offers us minute-by-minute updates about how the Thai children, in a race against time, might escape tragedy. Television viewers tune out of their local and day-to-day problems and tune in to the media coverage. What are the current oxygen levels in the cave? How many countries have joined the effort to save them? Are the boys capable of learning how to use scuba equipment before the…

Could Orthodoxy Be Having its Vatican II Moment?

By Chrissy Stroop

…a, Antioch and Russia changed their minds about attending at the very last minute (less than two weeks before the opening of the council), especially when absolutely nothing had transpired in the meanwhile! The current mood in Crete is peaceful and determined. The Churches that have arrived for the official opening are already working on the draft message to be published at the end of the council. They are, of course, also saddened that some Churc…

What a Forgotten 19th Century Suffragist Can Teach Us About Women’s Rights vs. The Religious Right

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

“Americans never move until the fifty-ninth minute of the eleventh hour. The fifty-ninth minute is now upon us.” —Matilda Joslyn Gage, “The Dangers of the Hour” (1890) If America is currently being “taken back” and made “great again” we seem to be landing somewhere in the late 19th century. It’s easy to say that great strides have been made toward racial and gender equality in the last 150 years, yet one can’t help being struck by the parallel di…

Challenging Both Homophobia in Islam and Populist Bogeyman of ‘The Homophobic Muslim’; and More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…s in Chicago. This spring, a day after his birthday, Kolesov recorded a 15-minute message to young gay people in Russia, and it went viral. A few excerpts: He went on, in Russian, to tell the story of growing up as the fourth of six brothers in a small town, an hour’s drive from Moscow, where his father was a deacon and his mother was a youth pastor at the Pentecostal church. “In my family,” he said on the video, “I often heard that all gays shoul…

Dems Should Take Notes From Elizabeth Warren’s Pitch-Perfect Answer on Faith

By Daniel Schultz

…meeting (as candidates do). Her answer was great, and it’s worth taking a minute to understand why. First, let’s roll the clip: https://twitter.com/ewarren/status/1107841344553316352 I am an admitted Warren fan, though I haven’t backed her in the 2020 primary. But this is first of all a master class in taking an off-message question and steering the subject back to what the candidate wants to talk about. It takes discipline and preparation to com…

Barr and Pompeo Speeches Show Why Evangelical Warriors Won’t Abandon the President

By Bradley Onishi

…ting Trump? The threat was serious enough for the president to make a last-minute speech at the Values Voter Summit in Washington D.C. last weekend. For a man who often seems to operate according to instinct more than strategy, this was a calculated move. He needed to shore up his support among his most devoted base. In his speech, the president explained his policy change in Turkey and Syria as a choice to bring home American troops. “I don’t thi…

Egypt Goes After Gays to Silence Islamist Critics; South Africa’s ‘Open Mosque’ is Closed; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…o Gay Star News, festival organizers said the event was also hit with last-minute cancellations from many venues. Speaking of Russia, American religious conservatives can’t seem to shake their love for Putin’s anti-gay policies. As Miranda Blue notes at Right Wing Watch, Austin Ruse, who heads the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM), was on the planning committee for the recent “pro-family” summit in Moscow. As we noted last week, t…

The Collapse of the American Jewish Center

By Sarah Posner

…Operation Protective Edge, particularly of women and children—coupled with minute-by-minute coverage on social and traditional media by reporters on the ground for major news outlets—have intensified the opposition. Jewish Voice for Peace, because of its rhetoric casting Israel as an aggressor, and because of its support for the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, has largely been vilified by Jewish organizations as…

What’s a Faith-Healing Congregation to Do When Measles Hits?

By Rob Shryock

…t cures diseases isn’t just faith, it’s ritual. It’s two-hour visions, two-minute communal prayers, and evocations of God’s word. It’s easy to see why even though EMIC is not directly “anti-vaccine,” an exceptional number of parishioners at EMIC reject vaccination. If the real way to cure yourself is by chanting, praying, and meditating, why bother going through all the unpleasantness of getting a needle stuck in your arm? As EMIC showed, even fai…

Excommunicated For ‘Grave Scandal’ of Ordaining Women

By Roy Bourgeois

…a 15-minute live interview about the SOA and U.S. foreign policy. With two minutes left and moved by the spirit, I recognized an opportunity to express my solidarity with women in the Church, so I said, “We have been discussing the injustice of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. As a Catholic priest, I want to say that there will never be justice in our Church until women can be ordained.” I had about another minute remaining and wanted to say…