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Why We Stay: What the History of Mormonism Reveals About the Origins of “Race”

By Max Mueller

…e Mormons’ struggle for whiteness). What’s more, today most Mormons are non-American and likely non-white (the biggest Mormon growth areas are in the African diasporas of Central and South America and Africa). The Mormon people and the LDS Church itself has always grappled seriously with the implications of its racist past and continue to do so (see the church’s statement following the recent white supremacist march and terrorism in Charlottesvill…

Russia Expels Gay American Pastor, An Epidemic of Anti-LGBT Violence in Brazil, And More in the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…msadze notes that the event’s anti-LGBT messages were in sync with the anti-Western theme of the conference. The WCF, which gathers supporters from Russia and around the world, blames liberal views on gender and sexuality for supposedly eroding the “natural family” and birth rates. “The new view… is that the purpose of sexuality is individual fulfillment and individual pleasure, not the children,” said Allan Carlson, co-founder of the Illinois-bas…

Christian Charity Meets Its Match: If You Missed “The Overnighters,” Here’s Why You Should See It Now

By Beatrice Marovich

…ething along the order of spiritual crisis as well. To be fair, this church-as-lens perspective seems mostly to have emerged as a matter of convenience. Jay Reinke had opened up his church to itinerants moving through the town of Williston, looking for work and drawn by the lure of oil. Jesse Moss, the filmmaker, was himself one of those itinerants in a sense: he was an outsider who’d been drawn toward a good story, gleaming at the surface of the…

Does the Multifaith Model Work?

By Jas Chana

…s. Her letter stressed the importance of viewing post 9/11 America as Judeo-Christian-Islamic as opposed to simply Judeo-Christian. Absolute inclusiveness should be the core value of a truly modern society. In NYU-speak, a society of the Second Axial Age. At NYU last April, the university’s interfaith climate was tested over “Fliergate,” a move by students in NYU’s Students for Justice in Palestine to slide mock-eviction notices under the doors of…

Putin Theo-Propaganda Minister Kirill Invokes 600 Years of History to Lay Claim to Ukraine — Here’s What it Means

By Katherine Kelaidis

…bsume Orthodoxy into the Christian West: the Union of Brest in 1596 and the 17th-century betrayal of Ivan Mazepa. (Before I explain both, raise your hand, dear American Reader, if you’ve heard of either… That’s what I thought). First the Union of Brest: In 1588, the Patriarch of Constantinople, Jeremias II, traveled to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Grand Duchy of Moscow and formally acknowledged the Russian Orthodox Church, which had…

A Reporter’s Guide to the New Apostolic Reformation

By Frederick Clarkson and André Gagné

…om Calvinism and introduced dominion theology to the Christian Right in the 1980s and 1990s. Wagner and his close associates both introduced novel beliefs and practices, and revised others—steps which remain controversial and consequential to this day, such as the notion of “strategic level spiritual warfare” (see Glossary). For Wagner all of these 20th century movements are to be understood as “components of the NAR,” as he wrote in a 2012 anthol…

The American Right Hasn’t Adopted Children’s Rights — They’ve Redefined and Weaponized Them

By R.L. Stollar

…ee things to “thrive outside the womb”: a mother, a father, and a stable, “Western-prescribed nuclear family.” They call these three needs the “critical socioemotional trinity.” On the basis of these needs, Faust and Manning argue that children have two rights: the right to life (defined as the right of a fetus to be born) and the right to family (defined as the right of a child to their biological parents). In the two years since Faust and Mannin…

Don’t Blame Secularism: Reading Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion

By Jeffrey Feldman

…pheavals over the past 30 years. American scholars of Islam and some Muslim-American laypeople could probably have done much better than me. My point is not to dismiss the value of knowing the theological, historical, and geographical particulars that divide one path of Islam from another as a precondition for accurate description and analysis of politics, but simply to refocus on the much broader question: Why have Americans in general—Muslim-Ame…

Promise Keepers 2.0: Women and Jews Invited

By J. Terry Todd

…people and scaring the hell out of others: the stadium rally was its stock-in-trade—the praise band, the testimonies, the marriage advice, the Jumbotron video collage, the tearful reconciliations between father and son. The hugeness of these events and their emotive power were key ingredients to the spectacle. It was something to be seen, something to be felt. At the Boulder rally this past weekend, much was familiar to anyone who followed PK dur…

American Jewish Leaders Get Gaza Wrong

By Sarah Posner

…about the region for decades, on Twitter today pointed to an article she co-wrote—in 1994—in which the Israeli president pledged to “tear them [Hamas] apart, to chop them to pieces.” See how that has worked out? Yoffie, though, seems to revel in Israel’s aggression, writing that “Israel came into being so that Jewish children would never again have to huddle together in fear, terrorized by enemies of the Jewish people.” Do Gaza’s children huddle i…