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Mexican Bishops Exorcism Against Equality; African Bishops Oppose ‘Enemy of Human Race’; Israeli Islamic Leader Anti-Gay Op-Ed

By Peter Montgomery

…ing. It’s our right to marry the person we love, which is each other.” Africa: Catholic bishops meet to solidify ‘traditional’ views on family According to a report by Sandro Magister at Chiesa last Monday, five cardinals and 45 bishops from across Africa met in Accra, Ghana, from June 8-11 in a meeting called by the symposium of episcopal conferences of Africa and Madagascar. All in the clear light of day, not almost in secret like some of their…

Pledging Virginity to Dad: A New Doc Explores the World of ‘Purity Balls’

By Jessica Valenti

…t instead belong to their fathers and future husbands. But despite the radical evangelicalism and sexism the Wilsons promote, as I watched the film I found it difficult not to root for Jordyn. Here’s a young woman—a bit awkward, and a lot unworldly—who just wants to be loved. She wants a happy life, a family, and to please her parents. And she wants it desperately. The boundaries of her goals may be more narrow than most women’s, but that kind of…

Militias, Trump, Guns, and ISIS: Too much Masculinity?

By Stewart M. Hoover and Curtis D. Coats

…ed. “…it doesn’t matter what the cause is. What matters is that there is a cause—a cause worth fighting for, worth dying for, worth killing for.” So, what did they think defines maleness or masculinity? For nearly all of them, it boiled down to various proportions of what we have called “provision, protection, and purpose.” It is a commonplace of traditional domestic life that men are, or should be, breadwinners. Men also see themselves as protect…

Seven Years After Hurricane Katrina, Reflecting on the Fallacy of Divine Retribution

By The Editors

…rt. The Heresy of End Times Predictions LOUIS A. RUPRECHT • Jun 6, 2011 Apocalyptically-minded souls—nationalist and Republican, and all-too-knowing virtually to a person—are also ironically the most anti-democratic forces that contemporary Christianity has produced. Israeli Forest Fire as Divine Punishment, Religious Leaders (From Both Sides) Agree IRA CHERNUS • Dec 6, 2010 Rather than kowtow to an ancient who treats natural disaster in much the…

“Those Federer Moments”: Sports, Sex, and the Gender of Grace

By Franklin Strong

…llness, limits—every last schism between our physical wills and our actual capacities. Can anyone doubt we need help being reconciled? Crave it? It’s your body that dies, after all. There are wonderful things about having a body, too, obviously—it’s just that these things are much harder to feel and appreciate in real time. Rather like certain kinds of rare, peak-type sensuous epiphanies (’I’m so glad I have eyes to see this sunrise!’), great athl…

Is Monsanto Satan? The Pleasure and Problem of Conspiracy Theory

By Alan Levinovitz

…t through the alchemy of capital letters we transform them into fairy-tale caricatures of corruption and deceit, villains that help to make sense of it all. My own Satan has always been Big Business. For many years, I nurtured a hatred of profit-driven corporations and banks, engines of greed that deploy deceitful agents to visit iniquity on an unsuspecting public. I delighted in exposés of corporate malfeasance, and I found it difficult to concei…

What Robot Theology Can Tell Us About Ourselves

By Michael Schulson

…find any reason to doubt them, unless you count Siri on all those theological iPhones), the entanglement of robotics and Christianity has a longer history than you might think. How machinelike are we humans? For centuries, the Catholic Church was the main patron of automata—elaborate mechanisms, often driven by springs, that were the precursors to present-day robots. “Not only did automata appear first and most commonly in churches and cathedrals…

Mitt, Moochers, and Mormonism’s “Other” Legacy

By Mary Barker

…them. Ironically, Mormons are so trusting of us that Utah has become the scam capital of America, and the them is so politically skewed that no amount of good works on the part of the political left frees it of suspicion, nor does any scandal or plunder detract from the right’s “elect” status. Despite his profligate past (as the pro-choice governor of Massachusetts and author of Romneycare), Mitt is one of the Mormon us. My mom tells a Romney red…

Charleston Killings: This is What a Sin Against the Holy Spirit Looks Like

By Peter Laarman

…ings are projected onto the Negro.” Baldwin tells the hard truth that American white people cannot know and love themselves, cannot forgive themselves in the Christian sense of forgiveness, unless and until they know and love the American black people with whom their own identity is so closely interwoven. There is little doubt that the killer was projecting his private fears and longings when he shouted to the people in that Emanuel sanctuary who…

Anti-Gay Evangelicalism is the Norm: A Less Rosy Take on the Evangelical “Tipping Point”

By Chrissy Stroop

…nity from enjoying the same rights and freedoms they do. Let’s not mince words. Religiously justified bigotry is still bigotry. And this is why you lost me, evangelicals—because for every Peggy or Tony Campolo among you, there are still more than two Franklin Grahams….