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Catholic Bishops Meeting For Family Synod; South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church OKs Gay Weddings, Ordination; Court in Malaysia Deals Setback To Transgender Advocates; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…d that I was disappointed to hear that he was saying these negative things about gay people and about gay marriage.” Added Grassi, “It was a pretty long letter. And I mentioned my boyfriend by name and told him at that time we were 14 years together.” Bergoglio, less than three years before becoming Pope, responded with a “beautiful reply – a very loving reply,” Grassi said. “He started by apologizing because he had hurt me, because I was hurt,” s…

Nikki Haley’s Slavery Omission Typifies the GOP’s Tragic Pact with White Supremacy

By Annika Brockschmidt

…oday? What it means to us today is about freedom. That’s what that was all about. It was about individual freedom, it was about economic freedom, it was about individual rights. This is, of course, the very “States’ Rights” rhetoric that sparked outrage in the first place. And the follow-up to every claim that the Civil War was about “individual rights” and “economic freedom” has to be followed up with the questions: “individual rights to what? ec…

Is the Ryan VP Pick Good for Mormonism?

By Joanna Brooks

…ormon politico. RD: The election in the last six weeks especially has been about character. It’s been about Romney’s tax returns and Obama’s attacks on Romney. And Romney was actually losing that, compounding his longstanding problem connecting to voters. And now, there’s Paul Ryan. The focus has shifted. RAF: All of the character stuff was of a piece—Romney at Bain. Romney and his tax returns. Romney, the businessman. Romney, the Mormon priesthoo…

When Children’s Literature is Not Defined by “Innocence”

By Jodi Eichler-Levine

…that will be a different book. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic? When I tell people about my book, they expect it to be prescriptive: a tome in which I tell people what to read to children, or what not to read to them. While I do think that the folks who read books with young people will find inspiration here, that wasn’t my goal. Rather, I want us to understand what we do with our stories, not whether they are “good” o…

Are Evangelical Films Destined to Leave Secular Audiences Behind?

By Daniel Silliman

…ement in the 1970s, was frustrated at accusations that the remake was just about money. He was exhausted by questions about whether Nicolas Cage could do a good job as an actor in an evangelical film, since he wasn’t “covered in the blood of the lamb.” He was exasperated at people telling him they liked the old Left Behind movies with Kirk Cameron and couldn’t see anything good coming out of Hollywood versions. Had he even asked Kirk Cameron to be…

McCarthy, Born Again and Retooled for Our Time

By Sarah Posner

…ders and destroys —John 10:10). He had the courage to tell the naked truth about it while the New York Times lied about it for nearly the whole 20th century.” Noebel’s reissue of the Schwarz book, titled You Can Still Trust the Communists to Be Communists (Socialists and Progressives Too), pays homage to Skousen as well, noting that in 1958 he compiled a list of 45 “current communist goals,” six of which, Noebel writes, have already been fulfilled…

Andrew Sullivan Really Took This Opportunity to Misread Intersectionality?

By Sunnivie Brydum and Evan Derkacz

…oam Chomsky, and Joseph Graves (to name just a fraction) expressed concern about the book’s racist conclusions and doubts about its sources and methods. Charles Lane’s New York Review of Books piece provides a valuable look at the openly racist Pioneer Foundation from whose research Murray’s book mainly drew. Add to these considerable red flags the fact that, since 1981, Charles Murray’s research has taken place at right-wing think tanks, and that…

Forget Debates and Dialogue about LGBT Justice, the Religious Right isn’t Listening

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…d the culture is going to sentence us to death as a nation. When they talk about God removing his hand of protection they’re talking about something very specific—the ruin of capitalism. You got it! It’s the 1% versus the 99%. Religion has become crippling to the 99% without them knowing it. They’ll do things against their own economic best interests because the religious right has them convinced it’s going to save the nation. At the heart of it,…

The Cubit Vs. “New Age Colbert,” JP Sears

By The Editors

…Charleston, S.C., home. Last week, Andrew traveled back to Charleston, this time to collaborate with Sears on his latest video, where the two discuss science, religion, and why journalists will one day be replaced by robots. …

David Brooks’ Rant on Emptiness of Secularism is Poppycock

By Daniel C. Maguire

…sponse to the sacred—whether the sacred is understood theistically or not. Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism are godless, and yet they have been, and are, culture-shaping powerhouses of moral idealism. As Professor Chun-Fang Yu says “Unlike most other religions, Chinese religion does not have a creator god…There is no god transcendent and separate from the world and there is no heaven outside of the universe to which human beings would want to go for…