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Holey Holey Holey: The Problem with a New Study Valuing Religion at $1.2 Trillion Per Year

By Michael Schulson

…f the total revenue of American religious congregations. To get that final number, the Grims took one estimate of the total number of congregations in America (344,894) and multiplied it by another estimate of the average revenue of each ($242,910). Depending on how you look at it, $378 billion is a lot of money, or it’s not very much money at all. It’s more than the net worth of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Warren Buffet, combined…

New Mormon Anti-Gay Policy Sparks Mass Exodus From Church; Christian AID Workers in Africa Refuse to Help Gay Refugees; Ukraine Rejects, Then Accepts EU-Required Gay Rights Law; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…DP signed the LGBTI Rights Agreement upon being elected. After the November 1st repeat of the general election, 16 of these candidates were elected once again. European Union: LGBT Rights in progress reports for nations seeking EU membership On Thursday, the European Commission published its annual progress reports on seven countries’ progress toward EU membership: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia, and Turkey….

6 Overlooked Takeaways From a Reviewer of Controversial Texas Textbooks

By David R. Brockman

…sm in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 12-16. I should add, however, that to their credit, the authors of the Pearson text do note that Christians’ brutal treatment of Muslims and Jews during the Crusades (6.8, Text 3: 3), a point sometimes omitted in other textbooks. 9 Cengage-National Geographic, World Cultures and Geography: Texas, R52. 10 Ibid., R53. 11 Quoted in “P2015_NatGeogWCGResponsestoTX—110614…

7 Women Scholars On the Gender Divide in Religious Studies, the Power of Mentors, and Leading While Female

By Rebecca Barrett-Fox

…ldless. LEADING WHILE FEMALE Elaine Howard Ecklund: Even with an increased number of women working in the sociology of religion, there aren’t many women who are named chairs in universities. The number of women in the sociology of religion who hold tenure track jobs, earn tenure, get published, and get cited is not changing as fast as we would expect, giving that we are seeing gender parity in terms of who earns a graduate degree. There are conver…

Global Anti-Gay Forces Plot Against ‘Satanic’ Equality Movement

By Peter Montgomery

…hat resolution clashed with police. The Washington Blade reports, “At least 10 LGBT rights advocates were injured on Monday during a protest in the Paraguayan capital that took place ahead of the start of the Organization of American States’ annual meeting.” Russia: Activists Arrested at Banned Pride Events A number of activists were arrested for participating in pride events in Moscow, where officials had withdrawn permission for the event. Among…

Amway, Religious Right Pyramid Scheme, Returns to the Motherland

By Bill Berkowitz

…ews will likely take Spain and Portugal by storm…Imagine if just 5% or even 10% of Spanish and Portuguese descendants of Jews were to return to Judaism. It would mean an additional 500,000 to 1 million Jews in the world.” Interestingly enough, one of those who has found Freund’s work fascinating is James M. Hutchens of the Christian Zionist “Jerusalem Connection,” who has been promoting the piece. Why? Bartholomew: “I can see why Freund would enth…

Turkish Police Move Against Activists Who Defied Pride Ban; And More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…,” reports AP. Some 50,000 men were convicted under the legislation between 1949 and 1969. At Handelsblatt Global, Barbara Woolsey examines why marriage equality has not yet been achieved in Germany, beyond the personal opposition of Chancellor Angela Merkel, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor. Woolsey notes of the post-war government in West Germany kept paragraph 175 of the criminal code, which criminalized homosexuality, in place: The party bloc…

Prosperity Gospel and Foreclosure

By Sarah Posner

…ation but to make a “Passover offering.” Seven is a biblically significant number, the number of completion and perfection, and in this spring of 2007 the Praise-a-thon began on Easter Sunday, the seventh day of Passover. If you make the Passover offering, Munsey claims, God will give you seven blessings: God will dispatch an angel to lead miracles; rid you of your enemies; bless you with prosperity; heal you; give you longevity; give you an inher…

Ten Commandments of the Antichrist: The Georgia Guidestones

By Joseph Laycock

…warns that, “Armageddon can be prevented.” Whoever planned the monument in 1979 most likely imagined that Armageddon would take the form of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. “R.C. Christian” could not possibly have predicted the events referenced by the vandals, such as the attacks of September 11 or the election of Barack Obama. But Dice, and others like him, read the Guidestones much as they read the Book of Revelation: not as historical artif…

Fighting Demons, Raising the Dead, Taking Over the World

By Bruce Wilson

…ed it, the ‘new paradigm’ had just been invented. In the period of the late 1980s through the early 1990s, a group of quintessentially American tinkerers grafted new practices of ‘spiritual mapping’ and ‘spiritual warfare’ onto a peculiar and radical theological substrate emerging from the Latter Rain and healing revivals that burst out in Canada and North America during the late 1940s. They molded their hybridized new Christianity into a standard…