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Pence Meets With One of Putin’s Top Clerics: Strange Bedfellows at BGEA’s World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians

By Chrissy Stroop

…hs, Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev) of Volokolamsk—who was staying at the Trump International Hotel—not only participated in BGEA’s summit yesterday, but also, as first reported by Time, met privately with the vice president. Curiously enough, a key talking point from their meeting was that America and Russia should work together to fight international terrorism, a hallmark of the Trump campaign’s election season foreign policy rhetoric. Metropoli…

A Primer on Activism from Unitarian Universalists

By Kim Bobo

…os. The mass text alerts told people where to go and kept folks abreast of breaking news. 7) Ask for personal engagement and sacrifice. The UUA made a courageous and bold ask of supporters. People were asked to get to Phoenix in July and consider getting arrested. Approximately one-third of those arrested in Phoenix were UUs. Participants were blessed by the experience. Rev. David Miller from Solana Beach, California wrote in a blog post: This wee…

Rebooting the Universe: Doctor Who part X, Season Finale

By Gabriel Mckee

…ikely to have really existed, having been concocted from earlier myths and stories (although why anyone would try to pass off a figure based on dying and rising gods as a crucified Jewish Messiah is never adequately explained by those with such views). On the other hand, there are many who assume that Jesus really was in history as he would later be “remembered” by the church not only in its Gospels but in its creeds and its ongoing experience of…

Global LGBT Recap: Culture War Claims More Victims

By Peter Montgomery

…ral practices.” But, Gibson reports, an editorial in the Southern Cross, a newspaper run by the bishops of South Africa, Botswana and Swaziland, criticized the law, and called on the Catholic Church in Africa to “stand with the powerless” and “sound the alarm at the advance throughout Africa of draconian legislation aimed at criminalizing homosexuals.” Discussing this division among Catholics, William Lindsey writes at Bilgrimage: As Kevin Clarke…

Civil Unions Battle Heats Up in Italy; Church Leaders in Malawi Defend Criminalization of Homosexuality; Report on LGBT Student Group Sparks Backlash in Indonesia; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…Surrogacy is banned in Italy, as well as in many other European countries. Headlines warning of a surge in “rented uteruses” have abounded lately in Italian Catholic publications, as well as in more conservative lay newspapers…. Pro-Vatican elements among Renzi’s Democrats are among those insisting the adoption provision be jettisoned, and the premier has told lawmakers “to vote according to your conscience.” D’Emilio talks to a woman about the ch…

Undercover-ed Religion: 13 Stories That Went Missing in 2012

By Peter Laarman

…en I talk to gay friends about this, they all say the connection is about cruelty and brutality toward animals that are “harvested” or otherwise abused in the industrial food system. Maybe it’s a stretch to say that this extra sensitivity to interspecies cruelty derives from gays’ own exposure to cruelty—but it’s at least an idea worth pondering. 11. Interfaith Bullying Reaches Its Limit Ye Olde Mainline Protestants might be evaporating numerical…

Using the “A” Word: Israel and Apartheid

By Shalom Goldman

…s: “A nineteen-year-old Barack Obama gave his first political speech in February 1981, urging the trustees of Occidental College in Los Angeles to divest from South Africa.” The most newsworthy of the book’s findings is the claim that in March of 1975 the “Israeli defense officials offered to sell South Africa some of the nuclear-capable Jericho missiles in its arsenal.” That specific deal never went through, but it “was only the beginning of Isra…

Glenn Beck’s Fox Show Gets Canned

By Lauri Lebo

…ting out his shameful rewriting of history to fit his right-wing extremist worldview. During his time as a Fox News host, RD has covered the many varieties of Beck’s extremist views on religion. Indeed RD even provided fodder for Beck: at Christmastime, he mocked one of my posts on his radio show in which I took him to task for trying to hijack the Christmas movie It’s a Wonderful Life. Beck won’t be going away completely. According to the release…

Countering the “Countering Violent Extremism” Program

By Elizabeth Shakman Hurd

…ontrast between official ways of approaching religion in bureaucracies in Brussels and Washington, and the approach taken by most scholars who study religion. The purveyors of CVE programming tend to depict religion as a force for good (and for evil) that stands apart from the world and acts upon it. “Religion made them do it,” says the State Department. To the extent that religion is understood as a cause of political behavior, public interventio…

Kosher Quinoa or Human Rights: Guess Which Dominated Passover Stories

By Shalom Goldman

…more stringent with the passing of each and every Passover. When the media stories focus on Passover food laws, other Passover stories—those that address the spiritual and political meanings of the holiday—are overlooked. As many scholars have noted, the biblical injunction to respect the stranger in your land, “because you were strangers in the Land of Egypt,” is much more frequently repeated in the Bible than the injunction against eating unleav…