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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

…r so long, so we are feeling very hopeful.” “While LGBT Catholics hope for changes, they are realistic enough to know that Francis may not make those changes,” said [Francis] DeBernardo. “But he is doing things that will help their spiritual lives.” In another commentary this week, DeBernardo considered themes from the pope’s Sunday homily to cardinals gathered in Rome, saying that the themes of reaching out to the marginalized, while not mentioni…

RDBook: Apocalypse Without God

By Nathan Schneider

…for water. The lack of awareness of this problem is astonishing to me. The Southwest is drying up. Not long ago Atlanta was six weeks away from having no water, the whole city. And it is a global problem. In many parts of the world, there is neither enough water nor sufficient drinkable water. Water is also being polluted by farming practices, which involve the use of fertilizers and pesticides on a massive scale that seep down into the ground wat…

Creationism and Global Warming Denial: Anti-Science’s Kissing Cousins?

By Lauri Lebo

…em with evolutionary theory), not all conservative Christians deny climate change. The Evangelical Call to Action on Climate Change and its lobbying arm Evangelical Climate Initiative seek to address environmental problems from a Christian perspective of charity, social justice, and biblical stewardship. “With climate change, it’s not as directly tied into a literal interpretation of the Bible, it’s more piggybacked,” said Prothero, whose book, Gr…

Presbyterians, Change Hearts & Minds, Begin Ordaining Gays

By MaryAnn McKibben Dana

…d ran a 50-state, all-173-presbytery campaign.” This included church-based phone banks; ads in national Presbyterian magazines; and letter-writing and story-telling campaigns using traditional mail as well as social media [YouTube, Facebook, Twitter]. “We [also] found church leaders who had changed their mind about homosexuality—what they had been taught about the Bible—and shared their stories in these national ads and through social media,” Adee…

Survey Finds Little “Francis Effect,” Two U.S. Catholic Churches

By Patricia Miller

…ng of Catholic camps that may make it difficult for Francis to effect real change in areas like immigration reform and, particularly, climate change and global economic inequity. Eighty-one percent of non-white Catholics said the government should do more to address economic inequality, versus 65% of white Catholics. And 86% of non-white Catholics said the government should do more to address climate change, versus only 64% of white Catholics. And…

Bishop Minerva Carcaño Has a Nearly Impossible Job

By Mary E. Hunt

…ighted I was to hear that critique from a bishop! She explained that every change happens at the local level; people need to figure out tough issues in their own context. Instead, mainline churches with global connections sometimes look far afield. Some, like the Methodists and the Episcopalians, default to the constricting policies of their partners in the south, for example in Africa. She observed that when denominations yield to those int…

Change v. Change at NPR

By Warren Throckmorton

…ed “Can Therapy Help Change Sexual Orientation?” The person who claimed to change runs a group called People Can Change and runs a weekend retreat using holding and touch along with highly active and emotive techniques (beating pillows to vicariously release aggression on parents) in order to change orientation. This is not what the New York Times article was about. In contrast to this report, the New York Times article generated no controversy or…

Distant Churches and the Isolated Poor: Lessons from Katrina, Ten Years Later

By R. Drew Smith

…esidents are less able to relocate at will, but even when they do they may change their location but likely not their social and demographic environment. For contemporary churches to meaningfully respond to urban desperation and desolation, (certainly in any way prefiguring the strategic role envisioned within oft-noted endtimes scenarios), it will necessitate a willingness on the part of churches to be present, engaged, and steadfast in contexts…

Why We Won’t Let Jonestown (Or 9/11 or Sandy Hook) Die

By Kelsey Osgood

…e story of a small group coming to grips with a mass cultural trauma. As a number of notable sociologists put forth in their book Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (University of California Press, 2004), society, to put it simply, can experience trauma like an individual can. As with the individual, there are a few things that make a society more vulnerable to trauma. “A society emerging from a major war, suffering from diminished economic r…

A Reforming Tradition Struggles With Change

By Brent Hege

…onal ministers, associates in ministry, and deaconesses, and currently the number of women and men preparing for ministry in ELCA seminaries is roughly equal (Susan Candea, “Wisdom Has Blessed Us”). While there are certainly some in the ELCA who continue to oppose women’s ordination, those numbers are small and grow smaller with each passing year. The same, I suspect, will be the case for the issue of gay and lesbian ordination forty years from no…