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Global LGBT Recap: Promise and Peril in the New Year

By Peter Montgomery

…he end of 2013, Pope Francis was declared person of the year by both TIME magazine and, more controversially, by the LGBT-oriented Advocate. As the year draws to a close, conservative and liberal Catholics, and LGBT Catholics and non-Catholics, will be keeping a close eye on the Vatican to see whether the pastoral tone set by Francis in his first year will lead to more substantial changes there and among national conferences of bishops. Some obs…

‘I Don’t Buy It’: The Gospel According to Frank Underwood

By Cathleen Falsani

…araphrased) lines from Hebrew Scripture about Abraham almost sacrificing Isaac and a truncated version of John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, he gave his only son….” (Even shows that handle religion remarkably well still need more help in the consulting department. I can’t fathom any clergyperson reciting John 3:16 and leaving out the second half of the verse: “…that whosoever believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.”) “Dev…

Blasphemy and Betrayal: The Murder of Salman Taseer

By Anna Bigelow

…e of blasphemy and the symbolic nature of a much-publicized case involving Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman accused of maligning the Prophet Muhammad, that brought Taseer so centrally into the public eye in recent weeks. The governor was one of the few government officials willing to speak out forcefully and publicly; not only about the trumped up case against Aasia Bibi (who was accused by neighbors with whom she was involved in other disputes at th…

Humanitarian Victims or Christian Martyrs: What’s in a Word?

By Donald Heinz

…discourse of the Enlightenment, which had set us free from priests and dogma and mystification, reigned as the single grand narrative of the modern world. But we are long since into the age of postmodernism, which celebrates multiple, competing narratives, all jostling with each other as varying communities of discourse meet and greet. Even the Supreme Court has decreed that religion cannot be the single discourse excluded from the cultural multip…

Can Expelled Teach Us a Thing or Two?

By Arri Eisen

…or his bit part in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Expelled makes the claim that Academic Science has erected a wall around itself and the theory of evolution, and that anyone, including scientists, who dares to question evolution, who tries to scale that wall, is ostracized by the system. This, according to the movie, is an affront to freedom, a basic right upon which America was built. The movie focuses on five or six folks (all of whom are challengin…

Mitt Romney’s Prosperity Gospel

By Peter Laarman

…he better evening because of his way with a microphone and his remarkable capacity to modulate his voice (not to mention outing himself as LDS pastor and bishop). But it was Billy Graham’s endorsement, splashed into our faces via an expensive full-page Sunday New York Times ad, that triggered my flat-out recognition: the 94-year-old daddy of all televangelists is laying his bony patriarchal hands upon a fellow preacher who shares his hawk-like pro…

Swift-Boat Veterans of American Jewry Charge Anti-Semitism at Occupy Wall Street

By Jay Michaelson

…far-right organization named “Emergency Committee for Israel” has produced a cheap YouTube video showing a couple of crazy people at Occupy Wall Street shouting antisemitic slogans. For good measure, they’ve thrown in Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Eliot Spitzer endorsing the sentiments behind the Occupy movement; ergo, the three of them must hate the Jews too. This, of course, is ridiculous. As everybody should know by now, Occupy is a leaderle…

Francis Visits the Church that John Paul Broke

By Patricia Miller

…S this week. Pope Francis will find a church that is markedly different in a number of significant ways; so different, in fact, that it calls into question whether we can still refer to the Catholic Church in the US. When JPII made his first visit US, he found a church that was in transition but largely intact. Some 40 percent of Catholics went to mass in any given week and there were nearly 60,000 Catholic priests and 135,000 nuns, with the natio…

What a Turn-of-the-Century Anti-Abortion and Contraception Crusader Reveals About GOP Efforts to Ban Abortion Pills by Mail

By Steven K. Green

…le. He often claimed he was merely performing God’s will in an ongoing war against sin. Using an 1873 federal law that he wrote (the “Comstock Act”), he used his authority to seize objectionable material and prosecute people for transmitting “obscene” items through the US mail. Comstock went after lottery subscriptions, pornography, pulp fiction magazines, and even tracts advocating religious freethought. Anthony Comstock, postal crusader. Comstoc…

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

By Marion Grau

…nter-terrorism programming. If terrorism is geopolitical, it’s because it damages psyches as much as bodies. In emphasizing the geopolitical aspect of its “War on Terror,” has the West missed the fact that it has been colonized by a psychic terrorism—one inspired as much by the hypervigilant paranoia of homeland security and law enforcement as by any actual terrorist activity? This is the hypothesis I have grappled with after my experience earlier…