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Gambian Prez Rails Against Gay ‘Evil Empire’; Irish Priest Comes Out During Mass; Trans Talk on Tunisian TV Sparks Debate; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ing that it would be, “In order to cleanse society.” Mexico: Mexicali City Officials Continue to Resist Marriage Equality Last weekend officials in the city of Mexicali continued their refusal to marry Víctor Aguirre Espinoza and Fernando Urias Amparo in spite of an order by Mexico’s Supreme Court more than six months ago that the men could marry. The couple had previously been denied based on claims of incomplete paperwork. This time, the excuse…

Trump’s Pathological Devotion to Border Walls Isn’t Political, It’s Theological

By Alana Massey

…f political processes alone; that borders are the talk and work of elected officials and law enforcement, maintained by taxpayers, and delineated on official government documentation. But it is more accurate to say that borders are the work of mathematics and magic. For example, borders at bodies of water are determined by the distance from a baseline, calculated as the mean of the lower low tides on large-scale nautical charts created and maintai…

Does Conservative Watchdog Actually “Get Religion”?

By Joanna Brooks

…ocuses on religious institutions, their policies, their projects, and the “official” story, and another that focuses on the way religion is lived everyday in “unofficial” yet very real ways by common people of faith. Mattingly clearly cares about promoting precise descriptions of orthodox institutional religious doctrines and policies. But that doesn’t mean that he “gets religion” any better than the rest of us who report from the pews at the back…

Mass Conversion: Changing Churches to Stop the Church From Changing

By Elizabeth Drescher

…can and Episcopal churches to join the Roman Catholic church en masse, the official spin was that the move was motivated by a desire for greater Christian unity—a wish, as Lewis put it, to “enter into full communion with the Holy See of Peter.” At the same time, the small flurry of press releases, letters, statements, and ecclesiological cheat sheets also insisted that the new arrangement for full communion with Rome would allow St. Luke’s to “con…

The (Mostly Catholic) Anti-Abortion Roe v. Wade Schlep

By Mary E. Hunt

…t, LifeWatch, a group that has roots in the United Methodist Church but no official standing, sponsored a worship service before the march. Reports indicate that a mere seventeen people were in attendance, including some who are pro-choice. It was a day for papal flags, banners like “Archdiocese of Chicago,” handmade life-size crosses, and even a gold crozier that someone brought along to add gravitas, or maybe just in place of a cane. It was hard…

New Poll Reveals a Paradox in Evangelical Support for Donald Trump

By Daniel Schultz

…te boundary. Before secular government enthusiasts get too excited by this number I would point out that, for a fair number of evangelicals, the worry is that the state will interfere with the church, not the other way around. Similarly, a little more than one in four White evangelicals said the federal government should declare Christianity the official religion of the United States. Far more (61%) said that Christianity should not be the officia…

It’s The Apocalypse, Stupid: Understanding Christian Opposition to Obamacare, Civil Rights, New Deal and More

By Daniel Silliman

…would invest very little in this world. In fact, they’ve done just the opposite. This is a central argument in the book. D.L. Moody is often used to illustrate the idea of indifference. He famously said that the world is a sinking ship and God has given him a lifeboat and told him to save as many as he could. That’s the idea, that there’s not anything you can do but save those who are sinking. At the same time, Moody turned around and established…

American Sin: Why Pope Francis’ Mercy is Not Our Mercy

By Kaya Oakes

…act toward the imprisoned Poe ends up liberating both of them. On Jane the Virgin, the mercy given from parents to children is a reoccurring theme. Even in the recent film Spotlight, it is not the archdiocese of Boston or the priests who molested children who offer mercy to the victims. It’s the reporters who broke the story and got to know them as individuals who offer reconciliation and healing. Mercy is depicted in our media not as divine inter…

Some Thoughts on Richard Dawkins’ Terrible Tweet

By Haroon Moghul

…n Age, perhaps we should express happiness that Islam survived at all. Ask Australian Aborigines, Canadian First Nations, or our own American Indians what their countries think about their peoples’ pitiable record in Nobel Prizes. Yeah. Exactly. What countries? Once we step away from those societies, too, we see that Muslims who enter into different social systems and cultural politics can do quite well for themselves, while retaining religiosity….

The End (of Religion) is Near, Scientists Say

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…in the Czech Republic. The mathematicians seem far more surprised by these numbers than most religionists would be. The first and most obvious reason involves an important distinction that when you shift the language away from “God” or “religion” and turn to conceptions of “sacrality” or “the sacred,”’ whole new worlds of meaning and meaningful activity bubble to the surface. Lost in the debate is the large and growing number of thoughtful people…