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Will Catholic Voters Support LGBT Rights in Washington State?

By Joanna Brooks

…te, where the decision will be made. We are participating in a Catholic-to-Catholic phone bank that Washington United for Marriage has set up on Wednesday nights and we assist with the larger phone bank at the Jewish synagogue downtown. A great deal of our work is communicating with Catholics on our email list and Facebook. As a Catholic, how does your faith shape your views on marriage for LGBT people? My faith blossomed in the 1960s after Vatica…

Should NASA Have Given $1.1 Million to a Theology Institute?

By Michael Schulson

…doesn’t have immediate or obvious applications. Funding for basic research can occasionally upset Congressional Republicans or generate catchy headlines for Fox News, but it’s an important part of science, and it can yield huge breakthroughs. In the case of astrobiology, all these Big Questions can pull scientists into a speculative-philosophical space that sounds like the domain of the humanities or even, yes, theology. What, exactly, is life? Wh…

How To Talk To “Nones” and Influence People: Rob Bell’s Transrational Experience

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…ld be. In a way his aversion to politics echoes a much older style of American evangelicalism, where spirituality was not meant to be contaminated by the world. And perhaps Bell knows his audience. Last month the Raleigh News & Observer published a basic explainer on transgender issues. What is “gender identity”? What is “gender expression?” “What does it mean to say “transgender man” or “transgender woman”? If this had appeared in the New York Ti…

Is It OK To Use a Cellphone in Church? Pew Surveys the New Etiquette

By Michael Schulson

…vercome the basic issue, which is that broad-brush, quantifiable questions can only capture a slice of what’s going on. Pew is right to consider etiquette something worthy of study, of course. Etiquette is entangled with ethics—basic social norms and judgments pervade our daily interactions with fellow human beings. We pay attention to laws, and to the doctrines and practices of religious groups, but we tend to overlook the role that etiquette pla…

Godly Game or Godless Satire? Countering Biblical Ignorance with Heretical Humor

By Betsy Shirley

…ation humorous. We just said, ‘This is a nasty situation.’ And put it on a card.” I’m skeptical. Maybe all of the cards aren’t intended to be humorous, but some of them definitely are. I ask Caleb and Thomas when it’s okay to laugh at the Bible. Their response is simple: some parts of the Bible are funny, others aren’t. “I think God is happy when we laugh at certain things in the Bible,” says Caleb. “I would also think that there’s probably things…

Vatican Considers ‘Disordered’ Language; HBO Doc on LGBT Persecution in Russia; Nigerian Bishop Shifts on Anti-Gay Law; Arson at ‘Open Mosque’ in South Africa; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…f the Estonian LGBT Association told BuzzFeed News that it was a “landmark case” because no other former Soviet republic has established this level of protections for same-sex couples. Russia and its proxies have used opposition to LGBT rights as a tool to try to foster hostility throughout Eastern Europe towards the European Union, which Estonia joined in 2004. Kyrgyzstan, a mostly Muslim nation in Central Asia, is poised to pass a ban on “homose…

Religious Hostility to Gay Nigerians; The Pope’s Visit To Africa; Ireland’s Religious Schools Can’t Discriminate Against Gays; Orthodox Church in Georgia Leads Anti-Gay Forces; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ho have to deal with it on a regular basis,” she said. “I have already had phone calls from irate family members: ‘how could I perform the ceremony, didn’t I know this was wrong and not biblical’. I have, in my studies, a different interpretation of a lot of what people say the Bible says. “I believe in the whole Jesus concept. You love people and there is no judgment. They have their belief system and I have mine and I’m living true to mine.” Dom…

Gay Marriage Opponents Running on Empty

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…. At the first, about a dozen volunteers spent the night making almost 300 phone calls and collecting pledges of volunteer support and contributions from 50 new supporters. Add that to the five other locations holding similar phone banks or collecting post cards of support, and I’m sure we easily got our 300 today. In addition, Equality Maryland hosted an interfaith meeting to mobilize supportive faith leaders. It was so great to see such a wonder…

Is There Hope for a Truly Progressive Evangelicalism? An Interview with Deborah Jian Lee

By Eric C. Miller

…anymore.” I relate to this very personally, and I think many young evangelicals can tell similar stories. Was writing this book cathartic for you? It was cathartic to give language to this experience and to explore the history of how exactly evangelical culture became about boundaries and scarcity rather than diversity and abundance. I grew up in a wonderful non-religious immigrant home in a white Chicago suburb. Because of my ethnicity, I encount…

Global LGBT Recap: Nigeria Jails Gays, Russian Orthodox Spox Calls for Criminalization Referendum

By Peter Montgomery

…is ridiculously reminiscent of the anti-Semitism of the 1970s and the American Campaign for Soviet Jewry, when we know from a lot of people’s memoirs, that whenever the Americans tried to negotiate with the Soviets about letting the Jews leave the country Soviet officials just couldn’t understand how it could possibly be so important to these important men to talk about this tiny minority that wanted to go to some tiny country somewhere. And we’re…