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‘Open Mosque’ in South Africa Receives Threats; ‘Blood Test’ for ‘Degeneratism’: Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…past on U.S. and British religious conservatives’ efforts to stop Jamaican officials from repealing the country’s colonial era “buggery” law. This week, a joint select committee of the Jamaican Parliament began an official review of the Sexual Offences Act, a 2009 law that further criminalized same-sex relations. In a June interview, Jamaican LGBT rights lawyer Maurice Tomlinson had accused Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller of a “blatant betray…

Remembering Rumsfeld: The Defense Department Gospel and America’s Desert Crusade

By Nathan Schneider

…ave let themselves be bothered to try. Enemy in the mirror These pieces of official iconography—at once digital folk art and presidential artifacts—lay bare that as early as 2003 the self-image of American war-makers at the highest levels had become hardly distinguishable from the enemy’s most populist propaganda. Terrorist creations collected by West Point’s Islamic Imagery Project differ only in that they were broadcasted rather than classified….

Global LGBT Recap: Francis’s First Year; Homophobia and Development; African Activists Push Back

By Peter Montgomery

…stians,” said a third. Gitonga, a powerful East African Pentecostal church official, is among a group of Kenyan leaders who have launched “Zuia Sodom Kabisa,” Kiswahili for “Stop Sodom Completely.” The campaign seeks 1 million signatures to petition legislation to criminalize homosexual acts in Kenya. Nzwili says that many clergy are grateful to Western churches for sending missionaries and making Christian converts, but feel a sense of betrayal o…

New Poll Shows Evangelicals Vote Democrat Too

By Robert P. Jones

…voters, 1 in 3 evangelicals voted in the Democratic primary, something the official exit polls could not tell us. To put that into perspective, that’s 160,000 overlooked evangelical voters in Missouri and 182,000 in Tennessee (a number greater than, for example, all African-American voters or all voters over 65 in the Democratic primaries in each state). • Importantly, the poll also found that majorities of both Democratic and Republican evangelic…

The Mormon Version of Infallibility

By Holly Welker

…e the following statement on the board: The prophet cannot err when making official pronouncements of faith and morals. Go ahead: Like Stevens, ask a few Mormons you know if they agree with this statement. Chances are good that you’ll get results much like his: All but one man in the priesthood class said, “Oh, yeah. That’s true. That’s what we believe.” When, at the end of class, Stevens admitted that this was his paraphrase of the doctrine of in…

On The Kerry Apartheid Comment and the Cycle of Chutzpah

By Sarah Posner

…) events: [T]his controversy played out according to a familiar script: 1) Official says something uncomfortable but true about Israel; 2) The Anti-Defamation League and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) condemn the statement, pretending to be shocked and appalled that anyone could ever criticize Israel; 3) Democratic and Republican senators rush to condemn the statement as well, with the Republican response a little more intens…

Honey, I Shrunk the Church: The Vatican Manages Sexual Abuse, Canonization and the Nuns

By Mary E. Hunt

…y or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It’s that last part in bold that’s so chillingly familiar in the Catholic cases. This time, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Holy See’s U.N. ambassador, tried to take refuge in its postage-stamp sized headquarters as the extent of its responsibility, the same shrinking tactic, with similar results. He didn’t take except…

Can You Be Liberal and Catholic?

By Patricia Miller

…or not, many in the media have bought into the idea that there’s only one “official” Catholic voice. Maybe it’s because the jovial Dolan, who’s no longer head of the bishops’ conference but frequently functions as its spokesperson, is right out of central casting’s idea of an old time Irish bishop. Or maybe it’s because dissenting voices are hard to find. Progressive nuns have been systematically marginalized. Now they’re dying off and aren’t bein…

5 Reasons We Shouldn’t Be Surprised that Catholics Support LGBT Rights

By Paul Gorrell

…driven by the advances in birth control—Catholics have largely ignored the official teaching of the Church on sexual relations within marriage and outside marriage. Teaching delivered by the celibate clergy on sexuality was seen as naïve, impractical and unresponsive to the experience of sexually-active Catholics. This was true in the early stages of the post-Humanae Vitae era and in later years when the Church refused to endorse condoms to help p…

Was Prof Wrong to Ask Students to Not Thank God?

By Hollis Phelps

…ultural critic Slavoj Žižek has often noted that in addition to the set of official mores, rights, and laws that govern a society, is an unwritten code or set of assumptions that govern how the former are to be interpreted and enacted. For example, if an acquaintance at work passes me in the hall and says, “Hey. How are things going?,” I’m aware that it’s not a real question, that she’s not really interested in how my day is going. Why? Because th…