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Leper Messiah: A Jesus Freak’s Search for the Meaning of Bowie—A Critical Novella

…n Mick Rock, Blood and Glitter (London, UK: Vision On Publishing, 2001), unnumbered page. [2] Marc Spitz, Bowie: A Biography (New York: Crown, 2009), p. 214. [3] Quoted in Mick Rock, Blood and Glitter (London, UK: Vision On Publishing, 2001), unnumbered page. [4] Ellen Degeneres: Search YouTube. As of this writing, an excerpt from the episode in question could be found here. “Totally credible plastic rock star”: Quoted in the booklet accompanying…

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Competing Visions of Family & Freedom at UN; Methodists Try to Avoid Schism on Sexuality; Catholic Cardinal Denounces LGBT ‘Demonic Ideology’; Global LGBT Recap

…ment. There is a widespread feeling that, despite impressive growth in the numbers and capacities of organizations promoting queer/LGBTIA+ issues, there has been little impact on the everyday lives of African queer/LGBTIA+ individuals and communities. Discriminatory laws and policies remain stubbornly in place in almost all countries, and the hostile public perceptions of queer/LGBTIA+ identities that sustain these laws and policies seem as pervas…

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Risky Business: The Pitfalls at the Corner of Church & Wall Street

…ity, access to education, etc. So, for instance, investors might support a number of projects through MicroPlace, an online micro-financing subsidiary of PayPal, with investments of as little as 20 dollars that help low income entrepreneurs in Texas, women merchants in Azerbaijan, the rural farmers of Cambodia, and so on, earning a return of 0.5% to 4.5% over 2-3 years. Not bad. Really? As a person of faith, am I supposed to be earning even nomina…

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Markets and Morality: Faith-Based Investment Group Profiles Polluters

…rophetic in this context,” she said, underscoring that they had “flagged a number of issues that could have been addressed sooner and at far, far lower cost to investors and to society in general.” On the other hand, Berry notes that they are not without successes, some of the issues raised about climate change over the past three decades, “are now a part of the business plans of many corporations.” “We have a problem in the auto sector,” Berry em…

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How to Make Nones and Lose Money: Study Shows Cost of Catholic Sex Abuse Scandals

…al, leaving the American church with a massive money problem and shrinking numbers of parishioners on the eve of Pope Francis’ arrival. A recent study by Nicholas Bottan and Ricardo Perez-Trugila in the Journal of Public Economics revealed that, unsurprisingly, “a scandal causes a persistent decline in the local Catholic affiliation and church attendance.” “Some Catholics join other religious denominations during the first three years after a scan…

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Does God Want Jeremy Lin to Win?

…ether in terms of kindness, or humility, or following their dreams, or any number of other positive values—just as it’s at its worst when it takes agency away. The particular myths that Tebow or Lin happen to believe in are secondary (and of course, I mean ‘myths’ in the sophisticated sense of stories that give meaning to human life, not false tales). What’s primary is that they believe, despite ample reasons not to do so, in the possibility of hu…

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The Suppression of Sin in Evangelical Abolitionism: The Wilberforce Problem

…odern-Day Wilberforces Arwyn Jackson, director of operations for Amirah, a Boston-based organization that aims to provide “whole-person care for rescued survivors of human trafficking,” believes that tying sexual slavery to these issues is dangerous. “There is a connection between all these things,” she says, “but at the same time they are their own separate thing.” Jackson identifies as Christian, though Amirah itself does not, and she says that…

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Are We Entering the End Times for Mainline Seminaries?

…nce existed mainly to train full-time pastors faced reductions in both the number of churches that could support such positions and the number of people eager to take the more challenging, but lower paying, church jobs that remained. Some seminaries shifted their missions to serve the academy or society more broadly, while others trained more part-time, second-career and lay pastors. These shifts were less abrupt than decisions to close or merge a…

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American Sin: Why Pope Francis’ Mercy is Not Our Mercy

…ing theme. Even in the recent film Spotlight, it is not the archdiocese of Boston or the priests who molested children who offer mercy to the victims. It’s the reporters who broke the story and got to know them as individuals who offer reconciliation and healing. Mercy is depicted in our media not as divine intervention, but as human instinct. Moral theologian Thomas Massaro, S.J., told RD that American Catholics “rarely think deeply about mercy a…

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‘Cult’ Is an Inaccurate, Unhelpful and Dangerous Label for Followers of Trump, QAnon, and 1/6

…desired collective salvation. On January 6, 2021, it probably seemed to a number of participants and supporters in the Euro-American Nativist Millennial Movement that they had finally achieved the critical mass of adherents to overthrow Congress. There are many varieties of millennialism. As I wrote in The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism: “A nativist millennial movement consists of people who feel under attack by a foreign colonizing government…

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