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Death Couture: Not For Halloween Only

By Stephen Andes

…divine presence inhabits the physical world via material objects. Although official Church teaching mandates a separation between sign (i.e. icons, etc.) and signified (i.e. the divine presence), in practice the two often merge. Both Roman Catholic modernizers and Protestant iconoclasts have for the last four hundred years tried to stress the transcendence of God’s presence—the absolute separation between the material and spiritual in the here and…

GOP Education Bill Would Radically Rewrite Religious Freedom and License Virtually Any Form of Discrimination

By Patrick Hornbeck

…he University of California’s Hastings College of the Law that barred from official recognition a religious student group, the Christian Legal Society, because the society excluded from membership anyone who would not sign a statement of faith and live in accordance with moral guidelines that included a prohibition on “unrepentant homosexual conduct.” Under the proposed PROSPER Act, of course, Hastings could not require a religious student organiz…

As COVID-19 Spreads, Nicaragua’s Leaders Opt For Trumpian Denial and Misinformation

By Jeannine M. Pitas

…ave closed, and most people are using masks and hand sanitizer.” While the official count cites fewer than 3,000 infections in Nicaragua, scientists express certainty that the numbers are much higher. “I believe that within Central America, Nicaragua is at the epicenter of the pandemic, and in terms of deaths per capita, the numbers are among the highest in Latin America, comparable to those of Brazil, Peru, and Ecuador,” states Dr. Jorge Huete, a…

The Collapse of the American Jewish Center

By Sarah Posner

…l reaction, these dissenters charge, not only unquestioningly supports the official Israeli narrative that Hamas left Israel no choice but to attack—and no choice but to target locations packed with civilians—but fails to acknowledge and address the ongoing violence and repression inherent in the occupation. That institutional reaction, additionally, fails to reckon with countervailing evidence to the official Israeli narrative of the immediate ca…

It’s Theology, Not Baseball: Misunderstanding Iraq’s Sectarian Conflicts

By Amyn B. Sajoo

…here is plenty of encouragement for that “low-intensity” domestic jihad in official legislation in countries like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran, where exclusive theologies accompany the dominant political ideologies. Sometimes, the two are inseparable — sharing a common enemy, pluralism. Of late, Indonesia and Malaysia have flirted with such behavior. This trend is hardly confined to Muslim-majority societies. Buddhist Myanmar and Sri Lanka, Hin…

Global LGBT Recap: Homogeopolitics; Dalai Lama Says Gay is OK; Pope Says Civil Unions May Be

By Peter Montgomery

…ayer that proclaims LGBT people an abomination to God, written it into the official catechism and continues to preach it from altars around the nation during mass. Nigeria: Anglican Church Officials Required to Take Anti-Gay Oath In Nigeria, where a new law expanding criminal penalties for homosexuality has led to violence against LGBT people, the Anglican Church of Nigeria is reportedly forcing people seeking official church positions to swear an…

COVID-Denying Father Sergei is Just the Latest Example of the Russian Orthodox Church’s ‘Holy Man’ Problem

By Katherine Kelaidis

…father of the Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Tsarina Alexandra. He held no official position in the Orthodox Church, a fact that did not undermine his authority largely because of a long history of tolerance and even celebration of extra-eccesialstical holy men not only within Orthodox cultures, but also by the institutional church. The tsarina in particular attributed magical powers to the monk, believing he was responsible for keeping the hemoph…

Talmud on Trial: Interfaith Dialogue in the 13th Century

By Michael Schulson

…the best way to learn about another religion is to study its texts and its official positions. The Paris trial challenges both. Perhaps it’s best to encounter religions in the real world, informally, with a focus on actual actions, not official words. Pope Benedict XVI worked hard to improve the Church’s interfaith profile, with limited success. While his largely positive attitude toward other religions could not have been more different from that…

And the Violent Bear It Away? Disciplined Nonviolence and the Coming Election Emergency

By Peter Laarman

…nseless in the face of stormtrooper-incited chaos and crime. Of course our official founders—those rich white men in wigs—chose to euphemize and sanitize what they knew full well would ultimately threaten the stability of their perfect machine: the unspeakable violence they authorized within the system of chattel slavery they wrote right into their consitution. Their system could contain the inevitable rising of the cruelly oppressed enslaved peop…

Does Mormonism Encourage LDS People to Lie?

By Joanna Brooks

…ther we practice polygamy? A few weeks ago, I sat in front of a radio microphone for the BBC program “The World”; with me on the program was a high-ranking public relations official for the LDS Church. Together, we did the same program twice: two back-to-back hours of the same hour about Mormonism, one time for the American audiences, and a second time for the whole world. During the first hour, taping for American audiences, when the inevitable p…