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Presbyterians, Change Hearts & Minds, Begin Ordaining Gays

…d ran a 50-state, all-173-presbytery campaign.” This included church-based phone banks; ads in national Presbyterian magazines; and letter-writing and story-telling campaigns using traditional mail as well as social media [YouTube, Facebook, Twitter]. “We [also] found church leaders who had changed their mind about homosexuality—what they had been taught about the Bible—and shared their stories in these national ads and through social media,” Adee…

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Change v. Change at NPR

…ed “Can Therapy Help Change Sexual Orientation?” The person who claimed to change runs a group called People Can Change and runs a weekend retreat using holding and touch along with highly active and emotive techniques (beating pillows to vicariously release aggression on parents) in order to change orientation. This is not what the New York Times article was about. In contrast to this report, the New York Times article generated no controversy or…

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Why We Won’t Let Jonestown (Or 9/11 or Sandy Hook) Die

…e story of a small group coming to grips with a mass cultural trauma. As a number of notable sociologists put forth in their book Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (University of California Press, 2004), society, to put it simply, can experience trauma like an individual can. As with the individual, there are a few things that make a society more vulnerable to trauma. “A society emerging from a major war, suffering from diminished economic r…

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Distant Churches and the Isolated Poor: Lessons from Katrina, Ten Years Later

…esidents are less able to relocate at will, but even when they do they may change their location but likely not their social and demographic environment. For contemporary churches to meaningfully respond to urban desperation and desolation, (certainly in any way prefiguring the strategic role envisioned within oft-noted endtimes scenarios), it will necessitate a willingness on the part of churches to be present, engaged, and steadfast in contexts…

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A Reforming Tradition Struggles With Change

…onal ministers, associates in ministry, and deaconesses, and currently the number of women and men preparing for ministry in ELCA seminaries is roughly equal (Susan Candea, “Wisdom Has Blessed Us”). While there are certainly some in the ELCA who continue to oppose women’s ordination, those numbers are small and grow smaller with each passing year. The same, I suspect, will be the case for the issue of gay and lesbian ordination forty years from no…

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Rage or Courage?: YouTube Terrorism Take Two

…oncept of ‘rage’. “There is no rage among my people, just determination to change, to never go back to the tyranny of the past.” He managed a smile and a handshake before he and his family returned to Tripoli. Bash of Civilizations What is it about rage that pervades so much thinking about Islam in general, and Muslim reactions to perceived insults against them and their Prophet? For starters, pick up the latest issues of Time and Newsweek, still…

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Participant Discredits the Original Ex-Gay Study

…dings with the 11 subjects (from page 1555, see below). Bussee was subject number two and Cooper was number one. Both Bussee and Cooper were rated as Kinsey 6 (exclusively homosexual) before change and a 0 (exclusively heterosexual) after change. Since there was no follow-up, this study has been used to support the proposition that gays could change to straight via religious mediation. For instance, not knowing any of this background at the time,…

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The Pope’s Gay Priests

…2000) and others, estimates at around half are confident, with even higher numbers among younger clergy.  The bishops know this and yet few are able to speak with the kind of candor the pope manages on a daily basis. There are reasons for this, which brings me to the third thing that happened—or didn’t happen—in the wake of Francis’ press conference. No bishop or church leader stood by Francis and in so many words said publicly, “You know, the pop…

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Oh Say, Can You See?:  9/11 Flag Displays and the Flag’s Symbolic Power

…is to convey the enormity of the loss of life, to make otherwise abstract numbers visible. In the Oak Brook commemoration, each flag has attached to it a brief biography of the person killed, with color-coded ribbons differentiating civilians and flight crews from first responders. Orlando, Florida, on the logic that far more were injured in both visible and “invisible” ways, has opted to erect 250,000 flags. It is not death that is primary here,…

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Why Cliven Bundy Wasn’t A Religious Right Hero

…cation of his religious worldview served to insulate him from conservative flight. Bump writes that Robertson’s “comments about black Americans were buried under a rush to defend the right of Christian Americans to express disapproval of gays,” and that, compared to Bundy Robertson “did a much better job leveraging political sentiment in his favor after his controversial remarks.” But Robertson didn’t have to do much leveraging; his comments came…

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