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The Dark Side of Our Obsession With Trapped Thai Children

By Edward E. Curtis IV

Children wrap themselves in Mylar blankets. In Thailand, the blankets cover young soccer players trapped two and a half miles inside a flooded cave system. In the United States, the same type of blankets cover children sleeping on a concrete floor in a detention center for immigrants in McAllen, Texas. Nature created one of these tragedies; we created the other one. The media offers us minute-by-minute updates about how the Thai children, in a ra…

Navy Yard Shooting: Why It’s Not a Religion Story

By Michael Jerryson

…a practicing Buddhist, when I learned he spent so much time vacationing in Thailand, it was not the profile of the person I would expect to pick up a weapon and kill twelve people in a rampage. Mr. Cuomo expressed similar sentiments: Which goes to the legitimacy of being a practicing Buddhist as opposed to someone who was fascinated with Buddhism and maybe hung around with Buddhists, because you know, it is a very defined philosophy, and being som…

Global LGBT Recap: Promise and Peril in the New Year

By Peter Montgomery

…to establish Dwayne’s House, a permanent shelter for homeless LGBT youth. Thailand: New LGBT-Rights Political Party in the Works LGBT activists in Thailand are working to create a new political party this year, but say they don’t have time to have it up and running for upcoming elections. According to a December 29 story in the Bangkok Post, the party “will be named the Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Expression Rights Party, or the SOGIE…

Buddhism And Politics in Myanmar: An Author Interview

By Matthew Walton

…ar book, to look comparatively at Buddhist political thought in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos. It develops some of the concepts and frames from this book but hones in particularly on an argument that positions Theravada Buddhist views on human nature as influencing the expansion and contraction of political participation and the boundaries of political inclusion across the last century and a half, regardless of political regime t…

What Fidel Castro’s Death Means for LGBT Rights in Cuba and More, in This Week’s Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…d. Although Magufuli has not said anything publicly about homosexuality, a number of his appointees have made harsh remarks. Critics of gay rights say this nation — which has large numbers of Muslims and Christians — must protect traditional values. In an August speech, Paul Makonda, the regional commissioner of Dar es Salaam, the capital, threatened to arrest people who were linked to gay men on social-networking sites. “If there’s a homosexual w…

Pride Month & Prejudice; ‘Worrisome Time’ For LGBT People; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ciety,” he said. CNN traces the start of the backlash to early 2016 when a number of political leaders began making “unprompted attacks on Indonesia’s LGBT community.” It notes that conservative Islam is a growing political force, evident in the arrest and conviction of Jakarta’s Christian governor on blasphemy charges. The report says human rights activists have been disappointed by President Joko Widodo’s “lackluster” defense of LGBT people. Sal…

Can Expelled Teach Us a Thing or Two?

By Arri Eisen

…ans would be attracted to, appreciate and consider careers in science (the number is decreasing annually). I bet we’d have more productive conversation among students and leaders of science and religion around the many profound issues in our nation that engage both: abortion, medical care, stem cells, homosexuality, and genomic research. The battle rhetoric would fade and, more than likely, movies like Expelled wouldn’t be made in the first place….

Mitt Romney’s Prosperity Gospel

By Peter Laarman

…I fervently wish that Mr. Obama would say a bit more about the problem of cheap grace. Reminding us that people who work very hard for very little are not the abusers of cheap grace, but that others in well-feathered nests who are preaching sacrifice might be in real trouble on the cheap grace front. Obama cannot and should not condemn those in the electorate who buy into Romney’s “there will be showers of blessing” message, but he probably does …

Swift-Boat Veterans of American Jewry Charge Anti-Semitism at Occupy Wall Street

By Jay Michaelson

…es ECI’s leadership – knows this to be the case. Which makes ECI’s video a cheap lie — yet another in a long litany of desperate efforts by the far right to convert the largely liberal American Jewish community to neo-conservatism, hawkish policies on Israel, and the belief that “Barack Hussein Obama” is a Muslim. That said, there actually are two interesting forms of antisemitism going on here. First is the antisemitism of ECI itself. To tug at…

Francis Visits the Church that John Paul Broke

By Patricia Miller

…umber of marriages within the church has declined by nearly half. Only the number of Catholic funerals has held steady. And while the number of Catholics overall has remained level, that’s largely due to Hispanic migration to the US; some 40 percent of those born Catholic have left the church. But numbers don’t tell the whole story. The church Francis will encounter is fundamentally different in character from the church of John Paul in two import…