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Why The Advocate‘s Choice of Pope Francis for Person of the Year is a Mistake

By Anthea Butler

…ess Pope Francis calls a council on human sexuality, I very much doubt his papacy will change much about the corpus of Catholic teaching on homosexuality—defined by that tradition as ‘intrinsically disordered,” While I very much appreciate the change in focus and tone from Pope Francis, I would caution everyone: “don’t get it twisted.” Pope Francis is still the Cardinal Bergoglio who opposed same sex marriage in Argentina. If I had to pick my pers…

Despising the Holidays: When Christians Led the ‘War on Christmas’

By Ed Simon

…mus towards the holiday remained in America, where New England Puritans disparaged the holiday (as Bruce Forbes describes here) as both a Catholic and pagan innovation—one which encouraged drunkenness and slothfulness. In 1712 Cotton Mather railed against “the feast of Christ’s nativity… spent in reveling, dicing, carding, masking, and in all licentious liberty…by mad mirth, by long eating, by hard drinking, by lewd gaming, by rude reveling!” In 1…

Why Egypt is America’s Enemy

By Haroon Moghul

…hough religiously conservative—and Syria was dominated by a secular Ba’ath party. Yet, as I wrote, the New York Times, America’s leading newspaper, irresponsibly confused religiosity with a lack of receptivity to democracy. (Then again, if you’re the majority, of course you’d support democracy—a principled stand is sometimes a partisan stand.) Following the latest in the Egyptian military’s unprovoked assaults on civilian protesters, who reasonabl…

The Moral Bankruptcy of Silicon Valley Asceticism

By Vlad Chituc

…lley upgrade. Maybe we will one day live in a techno-ascetic utopia, where parking lots become parks and power plants become museums because we all use solar cells and drink Soylent and have our clothes shipped to us (efficiently) by drone. But who will exist on the fringes? Rhinehart’s vision would have us invert the “haves” and the “have-nots,” letting the rich live lightly by offloading the messy business of consuming and owning to the poor. Th…

Why are Nuns and Monks in the Streets? (Parts I & II)

By José Cabezón

…n the Chinese government and Tibetans, but more important still are the campaigns of “patriotic re-education” that have been waged within monasteries. Beginning in 1996, this policy brought teams of party members into monastic institutions to “disseminate patriotic educational reform within the monasteries.” The ostensible purpose of patriotic re-education was to (re)train monks in party ideology. In actual fact, the campaign was aimed at identify…

A Startling Number Believe You Can Be Jewish Jesus Follower; Why It’s Not As Crazy As It Sounds

By Michael Schulson

…Jewish subpopulations, Reform Jews were the least likely to accept any compatibility, doing so at the rate of just 25%. This denominational pattern indicates that at least some of the respondents were answering in terms of Jewish law, not theological ignorance. Messianic Jews may also have influenced these results. It’s reasonable to expect some effect from their vocal claims that Christianity and Judaism are perfectly compatible. “There has been…

Just Like January 6, One of the Most Disturbing Aspects of the Right-Wing Coup Attempt in Germany is Who Was Behind It

By Annika Brockschmidt

…specific plans and inner-group dynamics,” says Lamberty. “However, several participants aren’t unknown to those monitoring right-wing extremism, and have been spreading conspiracy myths and narratives belonging to the sovereign citizens’ movement. Some of them made their world view public on social media. Often, this was not taken seriously, and the danger was underestimated.” In their midst, the terror group had a special asset: a former member o…

Pat Robertson’s Women Warriors Leading Spiritual Warfare In Zimbabwe

By Sarah Posner

…f God in order to prosper and avoid chaos and destruction,” according to a pamphlet prepared by the EFZ and supported by the ALCJ. Backed by the ACLJ, Mpofu has been traveling Zimbabwe to rally religious support for the EFZ’s constitutional proposals. “We’ve had a lot of support from ACLJ in America because for me to be able to go around the country to visit the ten provinces we’ve received some help financially and also we’ve received some help f…

The Atheist Encounter with Christianity: A Failure to Disbelieve?

By Paul Wallace

…tory. For some weeks I had been struggling with a timeline of the geologic past my dad had shown me. Adam and Eve were not to be found anywhere on it. And, as a pastor friend once told me: One’s theology is basically a question of what holes one can live with. So as I pondered the Adam & Eve question a kind of hole opened up in my theology until I could no longer live with it. Then, one day while I was talking on the phone in a dark room, just lik…

Report from Paris During COP21: Let Us Not Commit Global Suicide

By Donna Schaper

…. Here at COP21 there is a youthful spirit, a nearly Minnesota niceness, a palpable sense of hope. YES WE CAN, SI SE PUEDE is the spirit of every display. Whether the subject is a green bond for large cities or riding a bicycle so that you can charge your cell phone or blend your free smoothie, the spirit has that vibe, that playful spirit of early hope. Our skateboarder is ready to ride. Here you can see mushrooms growing out of logs injected wit…