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Pope Backs Anti-Gay Referendum; Islamic State Executions Include Gay Syrian; ‘Conscience Clause’ Debated in Northern Ireland; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ranking officials in the Church of England, came out as a lesbian. Trevor Grundy at Religion News Service reports that Ozanne revealed that she had subjected herself to various forms of conversion therapy, including one “where clergy tried to case out a sexual orientation they deemed demonic.” “God is a God of surprises,” said Jayne Ozanne, 46, as she took up her new job as director of Accepting Evangelicals, a network of Christians who believe th…

Is There Hope for a Truly Progressive Evangelicalism? An Interview with Deborah Jian Lee

By Eric C. Miller

…d hope. Their understanding of the gospel includes everyone—insiders, outsiders, the strong and the downtrodden—and that truly is good news….

Tony Perkins Will Fit Right in at Religious Freedom Commission

By Caroline Matas

…conservative Christian lobbying organization Family Research Council—and Trump’s newest appointee to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), Perkins exactly fits the profile of a commission championed by conservative Christians and largely focused on the rights of Christians abroad. Perkins is perhaps best known for his vociferous anti-LGBT stances. Designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Family…

Should We Accept The Apology of an Ex-Gay Ministry?

By John Blevins

…fear in our family, so I’ll watch and wait to see if that is what drives Alan Chambers and this new ministry being built on the rubble of Exodus International….

Why Darwin Keeps Coming Back

By Peter Manseau

…conformity it had wrought. As in Dover, Inherit the Wind put Darwin in the headlines, but the news wasn’t about his theory. It was about something greater. Three decades earlier, in summer of 1925, Darwin was a focus of the Monkey Trial itself, the context of which is actually more telling than the content. Four years prior to the stock market crash, the United States was already in the midst of what the historian Robert Handy once called the “Ame…

Religion, Morality, and the Death of the American Soap Opera

By Katy E. Shrout

…resonance: The Guiding Light, The Brighter Day, One Life to Live, Another World, As the World Turns, A World Apart, Days of Our Lives. Yet also from early on the soap had a frivolous, ridiculous aesthetic reputation at best, and was considered an outright poisonous influence at worst. During the Second World War, at least one psychiatrist worried that radio soaps were undermining the war morale, distracting women with addictive stories that promo…

Talking Back to a Mormon Elder: Religion versus Reality

By Brent D. Beal

…urch of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to believe things about the real world—not the world of faith, hope, and charity where religious discussion is usually confined, but the real world where we all live and have to get along with each other—that are demonstrably false. The Rainbow, in Black and White “Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone? Remember he is our father,” asked Elder Packer at one point. Why would he create homosexuals,…

Have White Evangelicals Finally Lost Control of the Narrative?

By Chrissy Stroop

…derway: The steady work of people publicly sharing their stories of deconstruction, their stories of abuse, their stories of triumph and flourishing after leaving evangelicalism over the past several years is yielding results. Hashtags like #exvangelical, #EmptyThePews, #ChurchToo, #deconstruction, #decolonize, #religioustrauma, and #LeaveLoud make it much easier for those still embedded in these communities [to find validation in leaving] than it…

Jose Antonio Vargas’ Coming Out and the Power of Stories over Religious Remonstrances

By Sarah Posner

…hould stop arguing by reducing the Bible to a soundbite, and start telling stories, “because gathering to share our stories clearly does have such impact it’s that much more surprising that such sharing almost never happens at the level of big intra-religious conflicts over economic policy or torture or immigration or health care.” Is not Vargas’ piece a quintessential example of such a story? Religious advocates — including conservatives — have s…

For God or for Fame? The Making of a Teenage Bomber

By Kambiz GhaneaBassiri

…what it tells us about the nature of these communities. We live in a media world in which news coverage of the individual Muslim’s actions metonymically represents Islam; not only throughout the globe today but also throughout its fourteen centuries of history. Pundits, Islamophobes, and Muslim apologists alike look to the Qur’an and the Islamic tradition as the source that could explain or condemn Mohamud’s actions, but his motives seem to make m…