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LDS Church Calls on Members to back Minnesota Anti-Equality Initiative

By Joanna Brooks

Last Sunday, January 15, in LDS congregations across Minnesota, LDS Church leaders read a statement over the pulpit encouraging Church members to support a November 2012 ballot initiative that would amend the Minnesota state constitution to restrict the right to marry to heterosexual couples. (State law already bans same-sex marriage.) According to LDS Church data, there are about 30,000 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints…

UK Church Leader Resigns Over Planned Removal of Occupy Protesters (Updated)

By Daniel Schultz

…Corporation, who might or might not have legitimate concerns about an open-air encampment? The protestors themselves, who might be damn dirty hippies, or who might be modeling the social concerns of Christ himself? It’s a fearsome balancing act, and not one I would be eager to have forced on me. Rev. Fraser has clearly decided that the church’s primary responsibility is to the protestors. Or rather, he believes that the church’s first duty is to p…

The Pope, The Chef & Krampus: Merry Yikesmas!

By Peter Manseau

…too quickly. And it turns out Bourdain thought so, too. What he’d hoped to air is a bit of mischief that would have elevated the No Reservations holiday special from simply very good to subversive classic. In homage to the stop-action ghost of Christmas specials past, Bourdain made his own Krampus Carol, complete with a horned demon licking the faces of children before he beats them with a stick: It really is a hoot, especially if you grew up, as…

Top Ten Peacemakers in the Science-Religion Wars

By Paul Wallace

…xpressed woe at the juxtaposition of late Cretaceous dinos and middle-class 1950s Waco. I’m good with it. Those dinosaurs were here, really here, in our world, for nearly two hundred million years. It is indeed a strange and beautiful world. Malick, in his graceful and courageous film, reminds us that it is made stranger and more beautiful the more we open ourselves to it. Both the closed-hearted scientism of atheist hardliners and the narrow crea…

Trump as GOP’s New Televangelist

By Sarah Posner

…ripture: “Touch not mine anointed ones, and do my prophets no harm.” (Psalm 105:15). Gingrich has already paid a well-publicized visit to the church of John Hagee. That was while his campaign was in the tank but too long ago (March) to be seen as the divine bullet his campaign needed. That came by way of Herman Cain (also of the church of narcissism) and now Gingrich hopes the church of Trump will catapult him to the top of the fend-for-yourself h…

Silver Bells and Atheist Billboards

By Steve A. Wiggins

…10,000 angels, instead He died alone for you and me.” He could have called 10,000 angels, but instead he called 10,000 religion scholars. (And let’s not start a Twelve Days of Christmas cascading laundry list here, or this essay will never end.) The numbers tell the story. The academic study of religion has become an industry. So has the church. No matter how badly clergy want their lives to be “a calling,” they are actually jobs for which they a…

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

By Haroon Moghul

…s probably thought Kamal Saleem represented Islam. But on the drive to the airport that disappointment lifted. America is in crisis, as Engle warned, but its solution can be intimated in the popular energy that has animated engagement from Wisconsin to Wall Street to Tahrir—on the way to the airport, I drove past Occupy Detroit. Our imaginations are once more open, as we consider the incompatibilities of unchecked capital and genuine democracy. In…

LGBT and Muslim? A New Report Busts Stereotypes

By Peter Montgomery

…nequal application of the law.” Making Change Visible But change is in the air, both Muslim majority countries and in the West. In America, the Human Rights Campaign recently hosted a reception for Muslims for Progressive Values, which describes itself as “an inclusive community rooted in the traditional Qur’anic ideals of human dignity and social justice. Shaikh notes that both two Muslim members of Congress, Reps. Keith Ellison and André Carson,…

#Occupy: A Deeper Form of Protest?

By Jay Michaelson

…ould take right now to close the wealth gap somewhat and make our economy fairer. I get irritated when more left-wing Occupy-ers suggest there’s no difference between the two major parties, because on these issues, there obviously is. If we still had a Democratic Congress, we’d have a much fairer tax code (plus better health care, plus a thousand other things). But okay, that’s me. When I look at vast movements in history—fascism, socialism, Ameri…

Irish PM Scathing Denunciation of Vatican

By Anthea Butler

…inality at its doorstep. When historians write about this era of the church 100 years from now, the Church will be a shell of what it once was, with liturgies appropriate for the 21st century not the 16th; its relevance diminished, and only the docile and brainwashed sitting in its pews and leading the church’s institutions. The prophetic voice of the Catholic Church has been silenced through the shameful and shameless behavior of leadership who a…