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How Much Did Jesus Care About Sex?

By Peter Laarman

…goes. Religious progressives have done a lot of serious work on the importance of fidelity in all relationships and the difference between fully-realized relationships that participate in the sacred vs. liaisons that fall short of that mark. Religious progressives, after all, are the ones who have tried to enrich, not degrade, the marriage sacrament by arguing that God blesses all deeply committed marriage bonds, not just marriages made by heteros…

Catholic Bishops End Family Synod With Little To Say To Gays; World Congress of Families Has Plenty To Say, None of it Good; How Same-Sex Marriage Came to a Buddhist Temple in Japan; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…on strengthening anti-gay and anti-abortion advocacy globally, the conference included training sessions on a range of topics, such as a session on messaging from Frank Schubert, the notorious mastermind of the gays-as-threats-to-children ads used to promote Prop 8 and other anti-gay initiatives in the U.S. The conference also included an “emerging leaders” training track, which provided scholarships to about 260 young people from more than 40 co…

Power Up: Turn Off the Cell Phone

By Daniel Schultz

…asked me. “We don’t want to be the kind of people who will interrupt a conversation at home to answer a telephone. It’s not just how you use the technology that concerns us. We’re also concerned about what kind of person you become when you use it.” Just so. Sigh….

Sacred Texting: When Religious Writ Gets Wired

By Rachel Wagner

…mmunity in France to adopt a revision to monastic rules that had remained unchanged since the time of the first followers of the Buddha. The “Revised Pratimoksha,” warns that any monk who “keeps a television, video player, karaoke player, electronic games machine, and any other kind of equipment used for showing worldly films, listen[s] to worldly music, and play[s] electronic games” is subject to a statement of “Release and Expression of Regret.”…

NC’s Gay Marriage Ban: “It’s Going to Hurt the Church”

By Nicole Greenfield

…dment 1 in North Carolina. Referring to Bakker’s theological “feel-good stance” as “cheap grace,” Rev. Mark Creech of the Christian Action League attributed Bakker’s preaching of a “toxic and counterfeit gay-affirming gospel” to being injured by the church as a child. “In some ways he’s right,” Bakker told me in response. “It’s called empathy.” He continued: “Every time someone accuses me of cheap grace, I go back and say no, it’s free grace. Grac…

“Saints Are Only Human”: Leaving the Church, But Heeding this Pope’s Lessons

By Elizabeth Colmant Estes

…laden paths of history, so often traversed by conflict, injustice and violence, in order to encounter her children, our brothers and sisters,” reads the English transcript. Yet the pope upheld Serra’s courage to move forward. “The holy and faithful People of God are not afraid of losing their way; they are afraid of becoming self-enclosed, frozen into élites, clinging to their own security. They know that self-enclosure is the cause of so much apa…

We Went Through Amoris Laetitia Section by Section So You Wouldn’t Have To

By Anthony Adams

…young people to accept their own bodies and to avoid the pretension “to cancel out sexual difference because one no longer knows how to deal with it”. In Section 293, the pope reports that his bishops discussed their treatment of folks who are in civil—not sacramental—marriages or simply co-habitating. The bishops decided that it is preferable to try to make nice-nice with those couples only because they might eventually be enticed to convert the…

Refusing the Monsters on Maple Street: A First-Person Commentary from the Mass Hysteria at JFK

By Marion Grau

…en Homeland Security began to impose “threat levels” that legitimized the increase in surveillance and control after 9/11, we’ve become used to (and yet also entirely unprepared for) moments of fear and terror. Being frequently put on notice for potential terrorist activity now feels normal, but under the surface of normality hides a heightened sense of insecurity, of fraying bonds of trust. I was at Gate 4 in JFK’s Terminal 1 when a wave of peopl…

Put Your Money Where Your Mind Is: A For-Profit Meditation Studio Opens in New York

By Michael Schulson

…spinning gym that has developed a passionate following in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. With MNDFL, at least, the resemblance is more than passing. The studio seems to be explicitly modeled on SoulCycle. The aesthetic is very similar. The language (“book a cushion”) resembles SoulCycle’s (“book a bike”). So does the layout of MNDFL’s online registration portal. Both SoulCycle and MNDFL project a happy-healthy-community vibe, merging th…

The ‘Dreher Affair’ Highlights the Right’s International Networks

By Annika Brockschmidt

…of trying to expel him from the party. A representative of the Central Council of Jews in Germany salled Maassen’s rhetoric “a vocabulary which exhibits a very brown, i.e. National Socialist, tradition.” Schuler, one of Orbán’s guests in his meeting with Dreher, gave Maassen all the time in the world to defend himself against allegations of racism and anti-semitism—in spite of the overwhelming evidence against him, and let Maassen claim that peop…