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Bill to Stone Gays to Death Introduced in Kenya

By Peter Montgomery

…g forces to reach a wider audience and gain political influence. “Until the 1990s, [LGBT] groups’ concerns were limited to discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity,” Diego Sempol, a history professor and member of Ovejas Negras, says. “But people are not only excluded for being gay, lesbian or trans, but for being an unemployed gay [person], a black lesbian or a poor trans woman.” The gay pride parade of the 1990s, w…

Seventh-Day Adventists & Gay ‘Cures’; Legal Victory for Kenyan LGBTs; Political, Religious Leaders Spar on LGBT Issues in UK; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ased, openly gay Muslim,” secretly videotaped his journey to Mecca on his iPhone and other small phones. “I was terrified because they reserve the death penalty for people like me,” Sharma said. Several times he had his equipment seized and video files deleted by authorities. But he persevered with both his spiritual journey and his film. “I was there making this pilgrimage for the thousands of gay Muslims who were too scared to go to Saudi Arabia…

What Can a Real Life Haunting Tell Us About American Religion? [Updated]

By Daniel Wise

…ouse. She reported that, whenever she tried to speak to this friend on the phone in the house about the haunting, the phone connection would be interrupted. As a busy woman with two kids, Maria doesn’t always have a lot of time to devote to spirituality, but when she does, she often relies on intuition. In the case of the haunting, she reports that her intuition pointed her toward the conclusion that it’s the land on which the house was built that…

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

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…and the message, but actually hungry for both. When I spoke to Bell on the phone a couple weeks after the event in Durham, he told me, In some ways what I do is basic pastoring. It’s, you give people an idea, you let them respond to it, you give them another idea….it’s basic spiritual direction. Like the itinerant rabbi, the guru—not to say that I’m a guru—but there’s a long tradition [of that kind of work]. But so many people right now are rethin…

Put Your Money Where Your Mind Is: A For-Profit Meditation Studio Opens in New York

By Michael Schulson

…udio was opened by a longtime editor at Glamour, Suze Yalof Schwartz. In a phone interview, Yalof Schwartz said that she decided to open the studio when she couldn’t easily find a place to learn meditation. I asked Yalof Schwartz how Unplug differed from the dozens of Buddhist centers that immigrants and hippies have sprinkled across the hills of Southern California. “Meditation is a science,” she replied. “It’s literally build[ing] your brain. Yo…

Conservative Rep Grills Oklahoma Personhood Sponsors

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…tors are caught in the middle, and the voters themselves are… well… making phone calls and holding marches, because what else is there to do? (When I called the office of one member of the Public Health Committee to register my opposition to SB-1433, the staffer on the phone said, “Goodness, it seems like everyone in Oklahoma is calling.” I wearily replied that most of the calls must be in support of the bill, right? “Oh, no,” she said. “Against i…

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

By Michael Schulson

…e walls tumbling down? When the Freedom From Religion Foundation puts your phone call on hold, you don’t hear muzak. Instead, the phone system plays a homegrown jingle featuring lines like “Everyone is tired of your piety / get off your knees and get to work” and “We’ve got to fight the battle of church and state / or the walls come tumbling down.” The receptionist told me that FFRF co-president Dan Barker, a former evangelical preacher and occasi…

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

By Betsy Shirley

…lary would be a swear, we kept it,” explains Caleb. He cites the example of 1 Kings 18:27. “That passage in the Hebrew is saying to them: ‘Your God can’t hear you. He’s off taking a crap in the bushes.’ So we kept ‘shit’ there. But there were other places where we had ‘shit’ because a swear would make it funnier and then we decided to cut that out in those places.” I later consult the Oxford Annotated Bible where a tiny footnote confirms: the Hebr…

Yes, It Can Be Hard to Be an Atheist in America; Now We Have the Data

By Chrissy Stroop

…saulted over their unbelief, although for African-American respondents the number is 2.5%. Meanwhile, 12% of respondents experienced threats of violence, and 2.5% experienced vandalism (14.2% and 3.2%, respectively, for Latinx respondents). None of these facts make the experience of “coming out” as nonreligious the same as coming out as LGBTQ, but they do nonetheless show that disclosing one’s nonreligious identity can be fraught and risky dependi…

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…