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‘Catholic Feminist’ Isn’t an Oxymoron, and Other Tales From a Beleaguered Tradition

By Celia Wexler

…er upbringing. At the same time, I was having my own crisis of faith. The papacy of Pope Benedict XVI in particular was trying. He had such a dour world view. He changed the prayers we say at Mass, and made them less personal and more remote. Even American priests did not like the new translation he approved. Benedict’s Vatican also scolded the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which represents tens of thousands of U.S. nuns, for its “radi…

More Mixed Signals from Pope Francis; Church of England Wrestles with Rifts; Faith Groups Lobby Pro & Con on Irish Referendum; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…. The website Erasing 76 Crimes published a new map of countries with laws against homosexual activity, which includes four fewer countries than it did at the beginning of last year. Responsible for the decline from 82 to 78 are Mozambique, which dropped its anti-gay law as part of a Penal Code overhaul last year; Palau, which decriminalized homosexuality last year; the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus; and São Tomé and Príncipe, which had actu…

Virtual Book Burning and Its Consequences

By Laurie Patton

…s’ threatened Qur’an burning has received a disproportionate amount of media attention, including hand-wringing about whether there should be media attention given to small-time pastors who use such tactics precisely to gain such media attention. And yet the lightning speed at which the threat, the negotiations, and the withdrawal of the threat occurred suggests another level of complexity to the iconography of the book which may be new. There is,…

As Long As There’s Fear, We Aren’t Ready for Atheism: A Conversation with Theologian and Ex-Priest Daniel Maguire

By Alana Massey

…s authors’ limited understanding of religious texts. Armed with a rigorous academic background in religion and the attendant understanding of the gravity of the God-loss, Maguire’s theological and pastoral training sets him apart from fellow atheists. By recognizing the poetic and ethical value of biblical stories in a more nuanced way than those scholars who offer only perfunctory nods to the Bible’s poetry, Maguire’s book offers a gentler welcom…

Lesbian Nuns: Still Immodest After All These Years

By Susan Henking

In 1986, Judith C. Brown published a book about Renaissance Italy called Immodest Acts. It was reviewed in the New York Times, The Nation, and the San Francisco Chronicle, not to mention many scholarly venues. Why? Perhaps because the subtitle of the book was The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy. The notion of the lesbian nun was not a new one. Denis Diderot’s 18th-century anti-Catholic piece entitled La Religieuse (The Nun) certainly p…

A Rationalist’s Ghost Story

By Gary Jansen

…s room was dark except for a small night-light that cast a puddle of light against the wall. As I was in the room, I had a strange feeling that I was being watched. I turned around and saw nothing out of the ordinary. I wrote it off as just my imagination, but after I grabbed the socks and I turned to walk downstairs I felt something, the intensity of which I had never felt before. The only way I can describe it is as if someone had an electric gl…

‘Anti-Romeo’ Vigilante Squads Target Men Suspected Of Being Gay; More in the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ind priests willing to perform marriage rites in Tampere, Helsinki and Vantaa, at least. But in Kotka, southeast Finland, the local diocese has issued a ruling banning even prayers on church premises for same-sex couples who have exchanged wedding vows. The ban extends to prayer sessions held by priests for gay couples who have tied the knot in civil ceremonies. Kotka clerics also decided to discontinue the practice of reading wedding announcement…

Snake-Handlers, False Messiahs, and a Few Great Souls: 14 Who Died in 2014

By Daniel Silliman

…ivil rights activists. He helped Martin Luther King, Jr. make the argument against Vietnam, drafting King’s “Beyond Vietnam”speech in 1967, broadening the concern of the movement and alienating some moderate civil rights supporters. Author of numerous works on American-American religious history, including There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America and Martin Luther King: An Inconvenient Hero, Harding taught at Illiff School of Th…

The War Within: Religion and Our Tangled Relationship with Our Bodies

By Michelle Lelwica

…cise, fruits and vegetables, meditation, and so on. How could my body so blatantly fail me? I lived with chronic hip pain for the next several years, postponing surgery partly out of fear that I could be that rare patient for whom something goes wrong, partly out of concern that my life was too busy to take time out for the procedure and recovery, and partly out of sadness stemming from my perception that an artificial hip signaled an irreversible…

Is There Hope for a Truly Progressive Evangelicalism? An Interview with Deborah Jian Lee

By Eric C. Miller

Journalist Deborah Jian Lee is a few months into a book tour for Rescuing Jesus: How People of Color, Women & Queer Christians Are Reclaiming Evangelicalism. So far, Lee has been approached by non-Christians, newly eager to learn more about the progressive evangelical movement, by young readers like the queer Christian who found a path to acceptance by reading the book with his mother, and by other women of color, who have thanked her for address…