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Australian Church Leaders See Marriage Vote as Battle for Soul of Australia: Global LGBT Recap 10/30

By Peter Montgomery

…ghts First reacted to raids on LGBT nightclubs in Belarus by saying it is “alarming that police targeted legal businesses violated the privacy of their patrons, demanded personal information and dragged some away to detention.” The group noted that the raids “come after a wave of incidents targeted the LGBT community in the region” and called on U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson “to take immediate action to ensure the perpetrators of crimes ag…

Why Are We Drawn to Horror?

By Mathias Clasen

…ories in popular culture? Surely, an anthropologist on visit from another galaxy would scratch its tentacled head in puzzlement over the amount of energy and time members of our species put into frightening themselves and each other. I’m interested in the paradox of horror, the bizarre fact that many of us voluntarily seek out the kind of entertainment that’s designed to evoke negative emotions in us—from disgust, fear, and anxiety, to dread—and I…

Anti-LGBT Culture Warriors On The March; More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ple who are romantically or sexually attracted to people of the same sex: Data included in this report shows that knowing someone in sexual and gender minorities’ communities has significant positive effect on attitudes towards them. Findings also demonstrate that a majority of people feel they can respect their religion and their culture and be accepting of sexual and gender diversity – evidence that strongly counters the discriminatory, and ofte…

Why Notre Dame’s Contraception Flip-Flop Undercuts Bishops’ Religious Freedom Claims

By Patricia Miller

…erty” meme that animates the rapidly rotting corpse of the GOP. When the Obama administration said that health insurance should include no-cost contraceptives as a basic preventive health benefit the Catholic bishops declared it an insult to Catholics and a violation of religious liberty. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who was head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops at the time charged it was part of a “drive to neuter religion.” The bishops decl…

The Forgotten Nones: The High Cost of Fleeing Fundamentalist Religion

By Andreea Nica

…y for those raised in a religion. By now many of us are familiar with the data on the “nones.” Nearly four in ten (39%) young adults (18-29) are religiously unaffiliated, and they’re nearly four times as likely as young adults a generation ago to identify as religiously unaffiliated. The primary reasons are skepticism in the teachings of religion (60%), a less religious upbringing (32%), or issues with religious teachings about or treatment of gay…

These Are the New Battlegrounds for LGBT Rights Under Trump

By Sunnivie Brydum

…re. And Price is no friend to the gays. According to LGBT media watchdog GLAAD’s “Trump Accountability Project,” the Georgia Republican scored a zero (out of 100) on the Human Rights Campaign’s Congressional Equality Scorecard, voted against repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and in favor of amending the Constitution to ban marriage equality. More relevant to this discussion and Price’s potential tenure as the nation’s chief healthcare official, t…

But ‘Natural’ is Better, No? ‘How Faith in Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science’

By Andrew Aghapour

…n Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science Alan Levinovitz Beacon Press April 7, 2020 I know that synthetic vanillin is chemically identical to natural vanillin. I know that my tongue can’t pick up on natural vanilla’s extremely subtle complexities. (In blind taste tests, people actually prefer the artificial stuff, probably because it’s more potent.) And yet, when faced with the choice, I most often buy what’s natu…

Culture Wars Masquerading as Social Science: New Survey Illustrates Evangelicals’ Election Year Anxieties

By Chrissy Stroop

…lical periodical Christianity Today and “hip,” youth-oriented evangelical magazine Relevant. The latter’s headline, “Report: A Third of American Evangelicals Don’t Believe Jesus Was God” is more typical of most coverage, but CT’s headline, “State of Theology: Evangelicals Hold Steady on Doctrine, More Outspoken on Politics,” gestures toward what will be more of interest to observers of the Christian Right in an election year. In order to understan…

Thomas Jefferson’s Bible Rejected the Supernatural Jesus in Response to the ‘Stupidity’ of Those Who Deified Him

By Gordon Haber

…se texts into a blank book and titled it, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. His idea was to present Jesus’s teachings in what he saw as their purest form—separated from “the dross of his biographers” in order to better understand “the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man.” The resulting book became known as the Jefferson Bible. The long, strange history of the object is now the subject of a new book by Peter Man…

For Clergy Who Ministered Through the AIDS Crisis Covid is Both Eerily Familiar and Puzzlingly Different

By Lynne Gerber

…ovid and then recede in the face of the also-familiar need to put feelings away and get to work. “How we got through the last pandemic,” she said, “it became the reality. You put your head down and you do it.” For Karen Ziegler, the political parallels have been almost uncanny. She was the pastor of the MCC congregation in Greenwich Village for a decade that spanned the emergence of AIDS. “I realized early on in the Trump administration that it fe…