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Pope’s US Visit Provokes Intense Attention; New Vatican Book on Man-Woman Complementarity & New Int’l Report on Christian Role Models for LGBT Equality; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…conference. Instead of worrying about judgements from others, we felt the spirit. David even commented that he felt the spirit more at this conference than he has at church for years. That got me thinking. Because the conference was a place of acceptance and love, David was able to focus and feel his emotions. So much so, that the spirit spoke to him often. At the conference, we were all encouraged to share our stories. Many shared experiences an…

Pittsburgh Paradox: A City Haunted by God and Steel

By Ed Simon

…makes the region a metaphor for the nation itself. Which is what makes the spiritual implications of Pittsburgh’s meaning all the more important, because if we try and reconcile transcendence with grubby reality, we derive a poetics of the sacred amidst the profane, what I described in a 2015 essay in Belt Magazine as being a place of “strangeness and… savage beauty,” so that “the physical and the spiritual exist in tandem here.” This claim is nei…

Rick Warren, Is That All the Courage You Can Muster?

By Ross Murray

…ed his young disciple that God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power and love and self-discipline. The spirit of power means speaking out, even when it slightly shifts your public persona, threatens book sales, or makes your followers a little uncomfortable. Archbishop Desmond Tutu has learned all of this, and I pray that the same spirit of power will encourage Rick Warren and all of our religious leaders to stand for “the le…

Can a Church Split Truly Be Gracious?

By Adam J. Copeland

…omination. As I wrestled with my feelings of confusion and inadequacy, the Spirit focused us on the gospel. The lectionary passage for the day was Matthew 4:1-11, Jesus’ testing in the wilderness. Emboldened by a commentary from David Lose, I avoided the obvious theme of temptation, and considered identity instead. While in some very real ways, with an affirmative vote the members of the congregation would soon vote to change their denominational…

‘Purity’ Guru Joshua Harris May Have Left Evangelicalism But He’s Still a Member of the Church of Patriarchy

By Sara Williams

…tortured shots of him wistfully looking out a car window or sleeping on a plane after a strenuous day of soul searching. Harris leans on a variety of experts throughout the film to help him understand where he’d gone so wrong, and how he needs to be enlightened. Yet the diversity of world class scholars such as Jessica Johnson and Julie Ingersoll, and public figures like Nadia Bolz-Weber, who offer thoughtful and researched critiques of evangelic…

“I ‘Came Out’ For Marriage Equality”: An Anti-Gay Activist Changes His Mind

By Welton Gaddy

…s say you run into someone on the street, or have a seat by someone on the plane, and they say: “You know, I’ve always believed that…,” and they tell you what they believe. “It’s what I grew up with.” Maybe, “I’ve even been involved in activism. But I’m having doubts, and I really am afraid of what might happen if I look at those doubts too closely. Do you have advice for me?” Well, I would say that it would be important to find a circle of peopl…

Trump Doesn’t Need to “Pivot” if Evangelicals Do it For Him

By Paul Harvey

…western civilization . . . This country is the equivalent of that hijacked plane right now. We’re headed to a disaster, unless we can get control of the cockpit again. Trump made clear what it meant to save Western Civilization. In a nutshell, it is to resurrect and defend “our Christian heritage,” and protect children from a media culture of mockery. Trump will tell the media culture, “you’re fired!” TRUMP: Yet, our media culture often mocks and…

Putin Escalates Ukraine Invasion to ‘Cosmic War’ — But There is Hope

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…f one’s military; it’s lifting military combat into the high proscenium of spiritual battle. This is what Patriarch Kirill and now Putin have done with their war in Ukraine: turned it into their own cosmic war. Such wars never end well. Like the notion of “absolute war” described by the 18th century Prussian General, Carl von Clausewitz, as long as a battle is conceived in cosmic terms there’s no possibility for negotiation or easy abnegation of t…

Embryo Men — Decades of Conspiracy, Christian Nationalism, and Fear Led Us to The End of Roe v. Wade

By Carmen Celestini

…ive one about the biography of groups or the nation; nostalgia lies in the plane between the personal and the collective memory. In this light MAGA was the perfect slogan for a figure like Donald Trump. Comments from a Proud Boys Chat Group on Telegram Using language and memes that promote the idea of the degeneration of the nation at the hands of feminism or gender rights, nationalists are positioned as the opposition to progress and create a sti…

Here’s What Hospital Care Could Look Like in a Post-Roe World

By Elizabeth Reiner Platt

…e detailed an account of how Texas’s abortion ban forced a woman to take a plane to Colorado for care after her water broke at only 19 weeks, well before viability. Thankfully, the woman was able to afford and plan the trip. If the fear of violating an internal hospital policy can cause doctors to withhold medical care from their patients, the fear of criminal prosecution will have a far more disastrous effect. After Roe, a physician’s medical int…