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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

…lice reportedly detained the pair at a bus stop and confiscated Mr. Cole’s phone. They then used images they found on the phone as evidence to arrest and convict Mr. Cole for homosexuality. Homosexuality is a criminal offense in Morocco, and relations outside of marriage can also be punishable by law. Italy: Mayors Resisting National Govt on Registering Gay Couples Several mayors are pledging to disobey the Interior Minister’s announcement that ga…

The Problem with Pew’s Science & Religion Poll

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…et of Americans respond to leading questions, posed by strangers, over the phone. But it’s science! Public opinion polling ends up existing in a strange gray space between science and journalism. A Pew report is definitively not a scientific paper: its goal is to serve media outlets, not to advance a body of academic inquiry. It’s not peer-reviewed. Its methods lack the scope and rigor of a formal social science study. That doesn’t make these repo…

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

By Michael Schulson

…, speculating, and damn, those kids are all doing x, y, and z on their cellphones, and it’s an outrage! Pew’s study of cellphone etiquette gives us one way to begin digging into a much larger set of questions: which norms do we, and should we, place around the use of digital tools? When are these opinions just personal preferences, and when do they take on a more explicit ethical dimension? When should we enforce them? Part of the problem is that…

Sex, Violence, Art, and Religion

By Kent L. Brintnall

…ould make me happy. Then, of course, there are the people I can name whose numbers aren’t in my cell phone: Murat Aymedir, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, Amy Hollywood, Kaja Silverman, Ernst van Alphen, to name a few. Are you hoping to simply inform readers? Give them pleasure? Piss them off? I certainly hope there’s pleasure to be gained in reading this book. I hope I’ve been able to capture a tiny fraction of the pleasure (or, the ecstasy, which is a…

Report from Paris During COP21: Let Us Not Commit Global Suicide

By Donna Schaper

…et. The Kyoto Protocol, which commits industrialized countries to internationally binding emission reduction targets, was the first climate treaty to emerge from this process. It was passed at COP3 in December 1997 at Kyoto, Japan and came into force in February 2005 when a sufficient number of developed countries signed the agreement; the United States did not, hampering negotiations for the next decade. A successor agreement, involving all count…

Rebuilding the Wall of Separation: A Progressive Discussion on Church & State

By Bruce Ledewitz

…utely object to government religious speech? After all, the reason for the high wall of separation must be something negative about the public face of religion, that it is divisive or emotional or superstitious. That would be true of private religious speech also. Not only do these hostile attitudes toward religion exist among secularists, they are supported by efforts to reinforce the high wall of separation between church and state. I had though…

Religious and Political Silence on India’s LGBTQ Decision Speaks Volumes

By Andrea R. Jain

…entrepreneur; right-wing activist; the person who would become Modi’s most high-profile spiritual advisor; and Indian television’s poster boy for homophobia—publicly criticized the High Court’s 2009 decision and filed a petition in India’s Supreme Court demanding homosexuality’s recriminalization. Stating that the High Court inappropriately intended to change moral norms, he suggested that the right to privacy should not include the right to devia…

Public Religion in a Post-Christian Age, Graduation Edition

By David Gushee

…have spent a lot of time at graduations. I have attended private Christian high school and college graduations, public high school graduations, Baptist seminary graduations, post-Baptist university graduations, and more. Hours of having to listen to endless name-reading has given me plenty of opportunity to reflect on the way religion, and ethics, are handled at graduations. And there are clues here related to public religion in our post-Christian…

Burma’s Spirit Festival, and More in This Week’s Global LGBT Roundup

By Peter Montgomery

…rt ruling Having lost the battle against marriage equality in the nation’s highest court, opponents of LGBT equality are turning to other strategies, including an effort to put the issue to a referendum and a campaign to removed LGBT issues from school curricula. In May, Taiwan’s high court gave legislators two years to implement legislation in response to its decision that the ban on same-sex couples getting married is unconstitutional. Forbes lo…

Religious Traditionalists Resist Marriage Equality, Artist Questions What Is “Un-African” & More in This Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…fore growing up in Egypt and Canada. In the 90s he moved to Melbourne as a high school student and became an Imam in 2001. He is now the director of Muslim LGBT outreach group Marhaba and has had several threats on his life. As he told ABC News, two men came to his door last year and threatened to kill him, after he’d appeared on the Melbourne-based LGBT radio station Joy FM. “They wanted me to stop talking about gay Muslims,” he explained. “But l…