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United Methodists Elect 1st Gay Bishop; Canadian Anglicans OK Same-Sex Marriage

By Peter Montgomery

…va turned what was to have been their first Pride parade into a protest at City Hall after police, citing “religious sensitivities” and potential violence, broke a promise to allow the parade to go down Rager Boulevard, the city’s main street. The Israeli National LGBT Taskforce (known as Aguda) had appealed to the High Court of Justice, but the court declined to overturn local official’s decision to require the parade to go down side streets. Jam…

Eid on 9/11 Anniversary?

By Haroon Moghul

…xious and afraid, might gather for help. The subways were closed, and cell phone service had gone out. I had no other idea how to find my friends, no idea where else to go. At the very least, I thought I had a responsibility to the Muslim students on campus. (Then again, I really had no idea what to do. I just thought I had to do something, anything, to help.) Walking into our prayer space, which was located inside a Catholic church, I saw a frien…

Safety Not Guaranteed

By Jeanne Carstensen

…lly part of the ocean, flooded over the boardwalk, sending long tongues of salty seawater onto FDR Drive and into city streets. As I walk down 10th Street toward the river, I read the signs of the water’s path: parked cars askew in the street, on the sidewalk; flooded basement after flooded basement; ribbons of detritus strewn in patterns that look like the banks of a rushing stream. As if it had been following the outlines of the map the flood st…

Men Without Guns: A Tribute to Larry McMurtry

By Amy Laura Hall

…I read it in order to understand my father. He grew up bookish near Archer City and became an uncommonly nonjudgmental Methodist pastor. To say the novel is about loss is to state the obvious. It’s in the title. What film critics mistook as a moral core to “Hud,” in the form of the aging rancher Homer, McMurtry shifts to Sam the Lion, owner of the poolhall, picture show, and café, who dies two-thirds through the book. The sagacity Sam holds is act…

Richard Land Steps Down, But Not Out of the Culture Wars

By Aaron Weaver

…o plans to build an Islamic center six blocks from Ground Zero in New York City. Unlike many opponents, Land actually offered a legal argument against the proposal citing the Supreme Court’s City of Boerne v. Flores (1997) ruling. Yet, back in 1998, Land called the Boerne ruling “one of the worst decisions rendered by the Supreme Court in its long history.” When not trying to restrict the rights of Muslims, Land was defending those sa…

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…

Does Record Number of Religious “Nones” Mean Decline of Religiosity?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…an religiosity—about religion as it is lived in the United States today? A number of what I would see as problems in the Pew report suggest to me that our growing fixation with religion-by-the-numbers may be distracting us from richer, more nuanced understandings of American religious practice. Wanted: A Community that Doesn’t Share My Beliefs and Values Take the demographic category of “Nones” itself. The Pew report notes the difficulty with sur…

“I Am Gay” Billboard Causes Stir in New York

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…But, Rev. Thompkins wasn’t alone: Daycare provider Pamela Spicer told the City Council […] that her clients read the billboards as she drives them to events in the city. She offers daycare to a 2-year-old, 4-year-old and 8-year-old. “When I’m driving them to the Schenectady Public Library and they say, ‘What does gay mean?’ how do I answer that question?” she said. “How do I expose them to such content?” My suggestion would be to tell the little…

What Good Is It for Union to Gain the World, But Forfeit Its Soul?

By Yazmine Nichols

…Jones was quoted using language reminiscent of Franklin: We’re a New York City institution. And we have a New York City-sized problem. But fortunately we also have a New York City-sized answer. God is calling us to have another 100 years, and the air rights are the answer to that call. Yes, indeed, a call is being answered. But which God has given the call? What’s happening at Union is a microcosm of a broader reality: poor people of color being…

Red Riding Hood Arouses Man’s Inner (Were)Wolf

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ed chicanery; it was terrifying, and all too human. The wolves outside the city walls threaten the life of the city. The wolves hidden among us may threaten the city even more. These are powerful mythic tropes, both the Greek and Roman ones. But the werewolf appears to be an Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic, rather than a Greco-Roman, myth. And what is most striking about these “werewolves” is that they are even more wolf-like than the wolves are. More pr…