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Dear Lindsay Lohan, I’m Sorry

By Haroon Moghul

…some movies that people liked, and some brown people, say several hundred million, wished you’d convert to Islam, not knowing that they still wouldn’t have a chance. (Who is this Habibi, by the way?) But it’s even worse that I took any part in it. So, for what it’s worth, on the extremely unlikely chance you’ll read this, I’m sorry. May you and all those who are sincerely seeking find happiness, contentment and success in this world, and may they…

The End of Jewish Education As We Know It?

By Benjamin Weiner

…ie—Rabbi Akiva did not agree. Akiva, a staunch pragmatist, who had been an illiterate shepherd till he started studying Torah at the age of 40, eventually rising to preeminence before he was martyred, at the age of 90, by the Romans, said there was nothing shameful about looking out for number one. Though elsewhere he proposed that the essence of the Law was to “love your neighbor as yourself,” here he asserted that partial survival was better tha…

‘Biblical’ Disaster in Haiti: Pat Robertson and the Curse of Unyielding Ignorance

By Matt Recla

…st up with some on-the-ground information from contacts when it becomes available. Until then, perhaps there is a prayer that can be said that will knock the power out from the studios of The 700 Club. That’s a prayer worth saying for sure. Becky Garrison | Pat Robertson: No Longer a Relevant Player When I received a press release from the People for the American Way (PFAW) titled, “PFAW Condemns Robertson’s Comments on Haiti Earthquake,” I wond…

As a Queer Catholic Woman I Had High Hopes Before the 2023 Catholic Synod on Synodality

By Emma Cieslik

…of his children,” or in 2023 that “people with homosexual tendencies are children of God,” a number of LGBTQ Catholics and advocates, myself included, got excited for a day or two—maybe even called our parents (if the Church hasn’t driven a wedge between them and us). But then the news cycle passes and, with each expression of anti-LGBTQ Catholic doctrine on diocesan and global levels, these small victories are tarnished with sadness and frustrati…

Indonesia Hears Islamist Arguments For LGBT Criminalization; Zambian Churches Oppose Condom Distribution in Prisons; Lithuanian Conservative Manifesto Calls LGBTs Enemies of Freedom; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…goal […] How [can] Indonesian LGBT persons strive for marriage equality, while many [are] still beaten up, harassed and fired from their jobs, just because of their sexual orientation and gender identity?” Pawestri’s column also points out flaws in arguments raised by other petitions, including one psychiatrist who argued that LGBT people “suffer from a contagious mental illness.” Human Rights Watch LGBT Rights Director Graeme Reid called the prop…

Pope Invites his Flock to Join Facebook: Is the Digital Reformation Here?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…risk of constructing a false image of oneself” also betrays a certain unfamiliarity with communication practices in daily life generally, digital or otherwise. When are we not communicating “only some parts of [our] interior world” (that with a big dollop of latitude on the notion of “interiority” itself)? Where are we fully free of the risk of duplicitous self-presentation? Yet the papal encyclical is to be lauded for framing the overall discussi…

Racial Justice Will Be Top Priority for New Prez of the United Church of Christ

By Frederick Clarkson

…ers to one question: “What did you see?” We won’t be able to dismantle privilege until we can help those who most benefit from it—namely white, heterosexual males—to see its daily manifestation in their lives. Therefore, we initially want to engage in a deeper conversation oriented towards this seeing. We will start by developing materials to help largely white UCC churches take notice of their “possessive investment in whiteness.” Among those mat…

The Passion of Katniss: How the Hunger Games Confronts the Trauma of Violence

By Michael Schulson

…and-banter films, the main characters team up to take out some bad guys. While killing, they flirt. Sometimes, when the combat quiets down, things will get hot and heavy, but often it’s just a lot of talk—Scarlett Johansson shooting an intergalactic invader while she chats about weekend plans with Chris Evans’ Captain America. In cadaver-and-crush films, the protagonists are detectives whose hunt for a killer becomes entangled with their quest for…

For Clergy Who Ministered Through the AIDS Crisis Covid is Both Eerily Familiar and Puzzlingly Different

By Lynne Gerber

…ieters is part of a unique cohort for whom the current pandemic is both eerily familiar and puzzlingly different. LGBT Christian clergy who ministered in queer communities in the 1980s and 90s are engaging Covid-19 using some lessons learned from AIDS ministry in the years before treatment. They’re also grappling with the spiritual, political, and social lessons we failed to learn in that epidemic; lessons that are re-emerging in this one. Bishop…

Discovering “Little Syria”—New York’s Long-Lost Arab Neighborhood

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…dozens of Eastern Christian churches, and bustling restaurants, bakeries, silk-traders, tailors, all living vertically next to the elevated train tracks, in time-honored New York City tenement tradition. Only, in contrast to Chinatown or the Lower East Side, there is nearly nothing left of Little Syria. I walked what remains of Little Syria with Joseph Svehlak, a longtime tour guide and founder of Friends of the Lower West Side, whose mother, of C…