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Grasping At Straws: The Problem with Common Ground on Abortion

By Frances Kissling

…ehind the words, it becomes apparent that we are dealing with classic smoke-and-mirrors politics. In reality, the abortion-reduction position favored by the authors of the Plain Dealer piece is shared by only a small percentage of progressive faith leaders. The constituency includes evangelicals and Catholics whose only area of disagreement is how illegal abortion should be. Both authors come from Catholic groups that have no position on pregnancy…

Why #FreeBritney is an #Exvangelical Cause

By R.L. Stollar

…dership in faith communities. The Calvary Chapel network consists of almost 1,800 non-denominational evangelical churches around the world. It was founded by pastor Chuck Smith in 1965 in Costa Mesa, California and grew out of the Jesus Movement of the 60s and 70s. “Today,” says Carly Fox of Calvary Chapel Watch, “the vast majority of Calvary Chapels are far-right, authoritarian, evangelical churches that embrace white supremacist thinking, Christ…

Heterosexual Martyrs and Gay Saints: Did AIDS Coverage Clear the Way for LGBT Equality?

By Diane Winston

…rested in the gay community and assumed their view reflected the population-at-large. The only stories that roused them were marked by sensationalism or conflict. As the dimensions of the AIDS epidemic emerged, these two themes—gay libertinism and religious condemnation—became frames for seeing the disease as a moral as well as medical problem. Even stories that were not about religious responses to AIDS often evoked the moral/medical axis. As the…

Orthodox Rabbi Imitates Pat Robertson

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…“800+ members” but does not list specific affiliations. The group of Ultra-Orthodox Jews have apparently been around since 1945, and “seeks to promulgate the cause of Torah-true Judaism through an organized rabbinate that is consistently Orthodox.” Levin says he agrees “with Eileen Donnelly of the Center for Military Readiness that this will hurt the cohesiveness of the military, cause many to leave the army, and dramatically lower the number of…

Pastor of Kentucky Church Severed From Baptists Over LGBT Inclusion: Not Activism, Just Honesty

By Mike Greer

…e church is preparing to host their first same-sex marriage next month. The 106-year-old Crescent Hill congregation is adjacent to The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville and before the fundamentalist takeover of the seminary in the early 1990s Crescent Hill was the spiritual home for many students, staff, and distinguished professors. Today the 800-member church is a diverse community of faith including people of various races, et…

Violent, Genocidal Anti-Palestinian Rhetoric Moving to US?

By David Sheen

…York Board of Rabbis, David-Seth Kirshner made this same assertion at a pro-Israel rally of 10,000 people a few blocks from the UN (which had just issued a statement expressing concern over “the deteriorating situation). In a video posted to Youtube, he is heard saying: “When you are part of an election process that asks for [Hamas]… you are complicit and you are not a civilian casualty.” Kirshner then proclaimed that the Israeli army is “the most…

Behind the Inclusive-Sounding Ads of this $100 Million PR-Blitz-for-Jesus it’s the Same Old Conservative Christian Fantasy

By Chrissy Stroop

…music is straight out of the manipulative megachurch worship service’s tug-on-the-heartstrings playbook—as someone who grew up partly in “seeker-sensitive” evangelicalism, I ought to know. The ads also feature mostly people of color, but interestingly enough, in the photo of the Signatry’s board of directors featured on its website, I count eleven white men, three men of color, and one white woman. Don’t think that disconnect will go unnoticed by…

Lifestyles of the Rich and Pious

By Patricia Miller

…t “morph into something like the Ku Klux Klan,” lives in a “one of a kind,” 19-chimneyed mansion in the heart of Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood conservatively valued at $14.3 million. And he is waited on by three nuns who live in a nearby coach house—very Downton Abbey. • Seattle Archbishop James Sartain, who is currently in charge of making sure that the naughty nuns of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious don’t spend too much time wor…

“Stress Test” a Con: Obama Still Coddling Banks

By Peter Laarman

…taphor, forgetting that the so-called patient being “tested” is actually an 800-pound gorilla that needs to be put into a cage if not shot dead outright. Johnson pointed out this morning that today’s news non-event even has a kind of Goldilocks character that the big media are bound to lap right up. It will turn out that the $1 trillion in TARP is an amount “just right” to cover the self-declared capital needs of the big banks. Bernanke said this…

Gay Marriage to End “Culture Wars”?

By Bill Berkowitz

…gape Press), and a legislative action arm, AFA Action. The re-birth of anti-same-sex marriage initiatives Anti-same-sex marriage initiatives thought to be buried in the wake of voters concern over the Iraq War, a crumbling economy, rising gas prices, and a record number of housing foreclosures, are making a comeback. In 2004 Team Bush, in concert with a host of conservative Christian evangelical leaders, made anti-gay marriage initiatives the cent…