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NC’s Gay Marriage Ban: “It’s Going to Hurt the Church”

By Nicole Greenfield

…Against Amendment One, Knight points out that conservative churches far outnumber progressive ones in North Carolina. “They’re encouraging their folks to vote as much as we are,” he said. “It remains to be seen who’s going to be motivated and mobilized to get out there and do it.” As far as media coverage is concerned, Bakker laments that the same-old anti-gay Christian perspective is still the easy go-to. “It’s a strange phenomenon,” he told me:…

Glenn Beck’s Cheap Grace

By Karyn Carlo

…way from the hard work of repentance, who tickle our ears with promises of cheap grace, and offer a vision of the cross of Jesus that has nothing to say to the crosses, and lynching trees, of history. But, if we do, we will be settling for the gospel of Caesar, not the good news of Jesus Christ. Perhaps it is time to put down the chalk, stop drawing pyrotechnical conspiracy theories that play into our worst fears and listen, instead, for the diffi…

Shocked by Aung San Suu Kyi’s Insensitivity to Ethnic Cleansing? Don’t Be.

By Michael Jerryson

…been no clearance operations. Nevertheless, we are concerned to hear that numbers of Muslims are fleeing across the border to Bangladesh. We want to find out why this exodus is happening. As State Counsellor for her government, Aung San Suu Kyi’s words are, at the minimum, disturbing. In her speech, she cites several times Kofi Annan’s final report of the advisory commission on the Rakhine State. On the very first page of the introduction, the re…

White Supremacy, Mental Illness, or Society: What’s to Blame for Religious Violence?

By Michael Schulson

…view of Books. (Courts have declared that Breivik, a white supremacist, is sane). And, based on my own feelings, I would hazard a guess that many who feel that white supremacy is to blame for Dylann Roof’s actions in Charleston were more hesitant, a few months ago, to argue that Islamism was to blame for the attacks in Paris. (Again, the two ideologies are not equivalent; the question is how much we privilege the power of ideas in our analysis of…

Killing Love in North Carolina

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…for Obama in the last election. But, overcoming any sort of bigotry in the South is hard work. As a born and bred Southerner I can assure you that our region will always be the taillights, and never the headlights, in the march for anyone’s equality. While the religious right will crow over this victory and shout how it again shows that people will stand up for “traditional families” — what it really reveals is that they will stop at nothing to ut…

Vatican Reverses Anti-Liberation Policies in Mexico

By Ruth Chojnacki and Jennifer Scheper Hughes

…by Vatican II. In 2000, 341 of Mexico’s 800 deacons served the Diocese of San Cristobal, the largest number of deacons in any Catholic diocese in the world. Vatican suspicion of Bishop Ruiz’s liberationist pastoral strategy resulted in a failed attempt to remove him in 1993. The deacon program came under particular scrutiny after the 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, with reports that Maya catechists defied the bishop and enlisted in the indige…

Openly Gay Mormon Appointed to LDS Church Leadership Position

By Joanna Brooks

…n LDS congregation in San Francisco. Before receiving his call to serve in San Francisco, Mayne had been attending an LDS congregation in Oakland, where Mormons have been especially active in efforts to repair damage to interfaith and LDS-LGBT relations since the LDS Church’s heavy involvement in California’s 2008 Proposition 8 campaign. Mayne was also in a committed, monogamous relationship with his male partner. About a year ago, Mayne decided t…

When the Church’s LGBTIQ Loss is the World’s Gain

By Mary E. Hunt

…-letters t-shirt. Selisse and friends marched in their SLUTS t-shirts in a San Francisco Pride Parade to the delight of many onlookers who shared their own religious backgrounds. There is something about what Berry calls the “kind of meaning and connectedness one can only find in a loving, supportive community” that religions profess that seems to attract people whom society marginalizes. So many LGBTIQ people have religious backgrounds, perhaps r…

RIP: Bishop Otis Charles and Rev. Robert Nugent

By Peter Montgomery

…ronicle in a 2004 interview after a wedding ceremony with his partner in a San Francisco church, a marriage that California didn’t recognize. They married again in 2008 when same-sex marriage was legal in the state. Charles was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1951. He was an anti-war activist and served as president of Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusettss. Egelko reports that Charles came out in 1993 shortly after announcing his…

How Does an Atheist Come to Believe in God?: An Interview with Jacob Needleman

By Lisa Webster

…gious teaching. In other words, I can be excited at a football game by the San Francisco 49ers, and I can, with the same quality of energy, the same part of myself, be similarly excited by the Bible, or the teachings of Jesus, or Buddhism, or something of that kind. The object is different, but the actual emotion can be the same. You can even say, “I love hamburgers!” and then, “I love my child.” Is it the same emotional entity, only the object ha…