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Why It’s Heresy to Read the Bible Literally: An Interview with John Shelby Spong

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…I write a weekly column and I get enormous mail and you can’t believe the number of mails I get from people living in little towns and there’s no church they can or want to go to so I am their church. I am the one point of contact outside of that community that makes them know they’re not crazy, because everybody else thinks they must be a Communist if they don’t go to church. I get letters from people who say they after they read one of my earli…

The Meaning of Make Believe (Why Religion Doesn’t Have to Be “Real”)

By Neil Ellingson

…nd is not forced to believe in the existence of anything…the only organ of contact with existence is acceptance, love. That is why beauty and reality are identical. That is why joy and the sense of reality are identical.” Her idea is that something, anything—the Bible, the cross, the person slumped over there in the café or asleep on that park bench—can become more or less real depending on the degree to which we accept them, how much we are open…

Vatican Instruction on Cremation Rankles Many, But Give it a Second Look

By Karen E. Park

…ter. Seized with what was perhaps the instinctive desire to be in physical contact with her again, I asked to see them. When the box was opened for me, I was overwhelmed. Here in a box on the counter was what was left of the body of someone I loved, someone I used to stay out all night dancing with, someone who I had spoken to just a week before on the phone, her laughter weakened but still familiar. When I thought about her ashes being scattered…

What Salman Rushdie’s Attacker Shares with Insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…hose to focus on Salman Rushdie. Some reports claim that Matar had been in contact with members of the Quds Force, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, who might have given him specific instructions to attack the novelist. A similar operation by the Revolutionary Guard focusing on the former US national security advisor, John Bolton, as the proposed target was recently intercepted and the murder-for-hire figure arrested. Like the planned Bolton attacker, M…

As the Right Peddles a Conspiracy About Trans People and Easter, A Reflection on the Spiritual Nature of My Gender Transition

By Ryann Croken

…me, but rather moves through me—like wind—and I can only really come into contact with the world around me when I allow this to happen. To me, that’s what “the sacred” is, most poignantly: It is the fact that our deepest inner beings are enmeshed in an embrace with the broader fabric that stretches across time and distance. It’s the paradox of finding your home precisely in the flux of change and transformation, and of looking and recognizing—aga…

Police Response in Uvalde Prompts Question: To Serve and Protect Whom?

By John Stoehr

…is more violence or the threat of violence. This means more police, police contact and police resources automatically means more violence because cops add their own violence to what’s already [there].” “They are the sources of violence,” they conclude. Another detail that gets me So what are police for? As I’m writing this, the Times reports that Border Patrol agents arrived earlier than previously known. But when they got there, the local Uvalde…

Homosexual Thoughts and Feelings Not a Sin, Says New LDS Handbook

By Joanna Brooks

…members may need professional counseling. When appropriate, bishops should contact LDS Social Services to identify resources to provide such counseling in harmony with gospel principles. If members feel same-gender attraction but do not engage in any homosexual behavior, leaders should support and encourage them in their resolve to live the law of chastity and to control unrighteous thoughts. These members may receive Church callings. If they are…

Gay Marriage Measure Dies in Maryland

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…holic bishops in the state have also stepped up pressure on their flock to contact delegates in opposition to the measure. It seems the pressure has given some delegates reason enough to push the pause button and not make Maryland the sixth state to recognize marriage equality for its gay and lesbian citizens. It could be seen as a defeat, or a cowardly display by supporters—but Equality Maryland sees the move as an opportunity to do more educatio…

Claude, Adieu: A Farewell to Lévi-Strauss

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ilian interior he went, he was unable to find people who had not had prior contact with European explorers. His quest for the pristine Other kept rebounding back upon the interrogating European Self. “There is no way out of the dilemma,” he tells us. So Lévi-Strauss concludes the book with a long section entitled simply “Return.“” It is not just about his return to France; it is really about his return to himself. But now, it is a self that has be…

Time to Get Rid of “Gay Christians”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…es writing with one particular hand. “Clinging” is like putting in colored contact lenses because the church and society only approves of one eye color, or coloring your hair because the church and society only approves of one hair color. “Clinging” is when you’re so afraid to live into the reality of how God has created you that you insist on putting on the mannerism of whatever way of living the church says is acceptable. So, you can “cling” to…