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Religion and Gender Trouble in the Black Arts: Remembering Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman

By Josef Sorett

…the scores of other clergy who took up the topic of Black Power during the 1960s. Father Divine was certainly different from most of the models of spiritual integrity (i.e., Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X) celebrated during the 1960s. It must have been odd for readers to find Father Divine on the pages of The Black Woman in 1970, the same year that Toni Cade took the additional name Bambara as an homage to her African heritage. He was not, by any measu…

LGBT Mormons Ask in Historic Temple: “If they could just see us, don’t you think they would change their minds?”

By Joanna Brooks

…s Burning”—the very hymn our ancestors sang to dedicate the Kirtland temple 175 years ago, in 1836, on a day when, as the folklore goes, neighboring villages reported seeing a cloud of fire hovering over Kirtland. Standing in the sunlit white interiors of the temple, Liam, a young gay LDS man who had travelled all the way from London just to take part in the conference, wept openly. His mind was on the leadership of his Church, the Church of Jesus…

An Historic Meeting: African and African Diaspora Women Convene in Ghana for First-Ever Religion Conference

By Rosetta E. Ross

…s and powers that put religion to use in service of empire. During the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s African-descended women (including Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Brigilia Bam, Musimbi Kanyoro [from Africa], and Katie G. Cannon and Jacquelyn Grant [from the United States]) joined other women of color from Asia, Central and South America, and Austraila-Oceana in shaping and broadening liberation theologies—and especially in challenging the patriarch…

#SorryNotSorry: What U.S. Christian Denominations Teach About Homosexuality

By Stephanie Russell-Kraft

… American Baptist Churches USA (Mainline Protestant) Members (as of 2009): 1,310,505 In 1992, the American Baptist Churches USA General Board affirmed a one-sentence resolution on homosexuality: “American Baptist Resolution on Homosexuality”: “We affirm that the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.” In 2005, the board added the same language to its official identity statement. 54% of members believe homosexuality sho…

Donald Trump Scares LGBT People Worldwide and More, in This Week’s Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…advocacy for LGBT Human Rights continues on a number of fronts. On November 18, an effort by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation moved an amendment that would strip language regarding sexual orientation and gender identity from a resolution regarding “extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.” More from OutRight Action International: Today [November 18], the Third Committee of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) has voted to maint…

Joel Osteen and Annise Parker: Strange Stage-fellows

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…s not going to tell homosexuals they can’t come to our church. If the Holy Spirit convicts them, then they’ll change.” Not to read too much into Iloff’s statement, but what I hear is that Osteen took the opportunity mix politics, religion, and friendship evangelism all at once. He got to pray “in Jesus’ name” at a government event for an elected official who happens to be an open lesbian, who says she believes in God – but the Holy Spirit still ha…

Jesus, Carpet Bomb My Heart: An Undercover Muslim in Detroit

By Haroon Moghul

…from what they were told it is. All the passionate music, jubilation, and spiritual energy cannot hide the meanness of spirit that would perpetrate this kind of fraud. As much as TheCall prayed for “Jesus to cover Dearborn in light, and cast out the darkness,” Kamal Saleem was the one speaking in the dead of night. Engle should pay more attention to his own moralizing etiology of America’s crisis. Democracy, like a free-market economy, operates o…

And the Violent Bear It Away? Disciplined Nonviolence and the Coming Election Emergency

By Peter Laarman

…nshirts—the Sturmabteiling, or SA—facilitated his rise during the 1920s and 1930s. A badly polarized Weimar Republic found itself totally defenseless in the face of stormtrooper-incited chaos and crime. Of course our official founders—those rich white men in wigs—chose to euphemize and sanitize what they knew full well would ultimately threaten the stability of their perfect machine: the unspeakable violence they authorized within the system of ch…

A Response to the Newsweek flap: Passages vs. Principles

By James F. McGrath

…hat text. The reason for doing so, according to not only Galatians but Acts 15, was apparently experience. The early Christians had witnessed uncircumcised Gentile Christians manifesting the signs that God’s Spirit was at work in their lives, and believed that God’s “seal of approval” in the present trumped Scripture, at least in this instance. That being the case, perhaps it should not take more than an encounter with some gay and lesbian Christi…

Blankets, Booties, and Jesus: Spiritual War on the Uterus in Rick Perry’s Texas

By Sarah Posner

…uttmacher Institute. Thirty-five percent of Texas women between the ages of 15 and 44 are uninsured, 13% higher than the national rate. Texas also has a higher rate of teen pregnancy than the national average, 88 pregnancies per 1,000 teen women, compared with 70 per 1,000 nationally. Yet in the face of this, the Texas legislature slashed family planning funding by two-thirds in 2011. The Republican-led legislature allocated another $8.4 million o…