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Donald Trump Scares LGBT People Worldwide and More, in This Week’s Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ery clear that the exhortation and surrounding conversations are “the Holy Spirit speaking” and, per the National Catholic Reporter, that the document is “faithful to the doctrine and to the teaching of the church.” At one level, all of these debates impact LGBT people and their families because the specifics of pastoral guidelines and the new openness to accompanying all people that is intended by Pope Francis can have very real consequences, pos…

Joel Osteen and Annise Parker: Strange Stage-fellows

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…s not going to tell homosexuals they can’t come to our church. If the Holy Spirit convicts them, then they’ll change.” Not to read too much into Iloff’s statement, but what I hear is that Osteen took the opportunity mix politics, religion, and friendship evangelism all at once. He got to pray “in Jesus’ name” at a government event for an elected official who happens to be an open lesbian, who says she believes in God – but the Holy Spirit still ha…

Jesus, Carpet Bomb My Heart: An Undercover Muslim in Detroit

By Haroon Moghul

…from what they were told it is. All the passionate music, jubilation, and spiritual energy cannot hide the meanness of spirit that would perpetrate this kind of fraud. As much as TheCall prayed for “Jesus to cover Dearborn in light, and cast out the darkness,” Kamal Saleem was the one speaking in the dead of night. Engle should pay more attention to his own moralizing etiology of America’s crisis. Democracy, like a free-market economy, operates o…

And the Violent Bear It Away? Disciplined Nonviolence and the Coming Election Emergency

By Peter Laarman

…ite supremacy mark a long-delayed and long-suppressed surging of the human spirit. It is good news, the very best news, and I believe it presages an entirely different human future, both in this country and elsewhere. But there’s also an element of great danger—and not just danger to white oppressors—whenever chickens come home to roost. We see before us the uncontainable rising of the Movement for Black Lives inadvertently becoming the backdrop t…

A Response to the Newsweek flap: Passages vs. Principles

By James F. McGrath

…itnessed uncircumcised Gentile Christians manifesting the signs that God’s Spirit was at work in their lives, and believed that God’s “seal of approval” in the present trumped Scripture, at least in this instance. That being the case, perhaps it should not take more than an encounter with some gay and lesbian Christians who themselves manifest the fruit of the Spirit, to persuade those Christians who value the principles embodied in Acts and Paul’…

‘When I Spoke in Tongues’ Points the Way Out of Fundamentalist Christianity

By Andreea Nica

…“The point was having this direct line to God, this evidence that the Holy Spirit had entered me and claimed me as his own. Now that same Spirit was reaching back out to God and appealing to him on my behalf.” It’s rare to come across individuals who can so precisely capture what it means to leave a unique and profound (religious) meaning system. Moreover, the ability to unravel the emotionally wrenching and often complex social psychological proc…

A Nation of Believers and Nonbelievers—Second Thoughts on Obama’s Speech

By Ronald Aronson

…ll of separation” is actually breeched, we worry: can’t this undermine the spirit if not the letter of America’s secular Constitution? And why did Obama submit to an informal religious test during the campaign, being cross-examined by Warren about his personal religious beliefs? Warren asked: “What does it mean to you to trust in Christ? And what does that mean to you on a daily basis?” And Obama dutifully answered. To us this seemed to be a yield…

Our Last “Genius” Stephen Hawking is Gone… Cause for Worry Or Inspiration?

By Ed Simon

…mplishments. The Latin term genius after all, refers to a type of external spirit inspiring the individual, but with the Enlightenment it was conflated with the word ingenium, the innate and intrinsic talents of the exemplary individual themselves. The result was something close to the modern ideology of the genius, the secular saint who is able to conceive of visions beyond black holes, and the poetry of mathematics. Genius was germinated as part…

Indulgences Are Back At Last!

By Kate Childs Graham

…onference: The family today must confront, with creativity and a proactive spirit, the challenge of an individualist and mercantilist culture, based on production and consumption. Unfortunately, we have a mistaken concept of freedom, understood as an autonomy closed in on itself; other forms of cohabitation are privileged that obscure the value of the family, based on the marriage of one man and one woman. With this mistaken mentality, very often…

Bad Religion Leaves Big Bruises: When Christians Threaten Health Care Reform

By Peter Laarman

…clusion I draw is that these are Ayn Rand Christians, never touched by the spirit of the Christ whose ministry was emphatically defined from the start by his compassion for the sick and for his healing of the multitudes who came to him with all manner of diseases. Jesus did not seem to think that it was taking anything away from the already-healthy to restore the health of the physically and psychologically afflicted. He did not operate from a zer…