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Thanks But No Thanks: How a Noted Theologian’s Defense of Larycia Hawkins Goes Bizarrely Astray

By Scott C. Alexander

…loving, is not only to commit a serious scholarly error—with echoes of age-old anti-Muslim Christian polemic. It is also helps to substantiate Islamophobic narratives that the DNA of Islam is somehow missing a key “love” or “compassion” sequence. Yet another troubling aspect of this essay is Volf’s puzzling approach to interreligious difference. On the one hand, Volf appears to understand what Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has famously coined the “dignity…

Welcome to the “Spin-od”: Conservatives Look to Halt Reforms on Divorce and Other “Family Matters”

By Patricia Miller

…ordes argues that: anyone who goes around the parishes saying that the long-sought-after ‘loop-hole of mercy’ [for divorced Catholics] has been found has shut his eyes to the aforementioned dead ends in Church history or else he is pretentiously self-confident: as though today suddenly such an ingenious theological insight had been discovered that it would open up a path that had been blocked for two thousand years. He knocks the proponents of cha…

Challenge to ‘un-Africanness’ of homosexuality; LGBT Catholics in Africa face church cooperation with persecution; lesbian cartoon project debuts in bangladesh under shadow of violence; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…The welcome from some American politicians is expected to be chilly. The 78-year-old’s decision to visit Havana before Washington has not gone down well, particularly as Congress has yet to lift the embargo against Cuba. His environmental encyclical and recent impassioned speeches in Latin America against the free market system, blind capitalism and rabid exploitation by multinationals of natural resources, have seen him accused of Marxism. Regard…

This Just In: College Will Make You an Atheist

By Susan Henking

…how education and religion are related—it matters for our future. Today’s undergraduates are, almost every higher education institution claims, tomorrow’s leaders. As UCLA’s HERI has noted, political engagement among first-year college students has hit a 40-year high. So: do we, or do we not, want religious leaders? If so, what sort of religious leaders? Turns out, college major (may) matter. Remember that… because it’s Back to School!…

How Will We Teach About Sikhism After the Tragedy?

By Laurie Patton

…ory of teaching about Asian religions in the United States began with Anglo-American scholars who became knowledgeable and the history and languages of Sikhism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and many others. But as more immigrants arrived to the United States after the 1965 immigration act, that situation began to shift. By the 1990s, two key trends emerged: there were many communities who preferred that they teach about their own traditions, and not leave…

Pope Francis Brokers End to Cuba Embargo, Despite Opposition of Catholic Pols

By Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado

…tforms to denounce the changes, they do not represent the majority of Cuban-Americans (68%) who support re-establishing diplomatic ties with the island. In fact, although they’re comfortable pointing to the Church to justify socially conservative positions, they’re in opposition to the Church on this one, with the pope himself having played a major role in the negotiations. In her 1993 novel, Dreaming in Cuban, Cuban-American author Cristina Garci…

“Taliban Dan’s” Teacher: Inside Bill Gothard’s Authoritarian Subculture

By Sarah Posner

…ible Exposition at Dallas Theological Seminary, criticized Gothard’s “chain-of-command” tenets of patriarchy in an essay: Paramount among these is the terrible picture of the chain of command in the family with the husband as the hammer, the wife as the chisel and the children as the gems in the rough… The ghastly picture is that he beats on her and she chips on them. If ever there were a reason for a women’s movement in the evangelical church—thi…

Top Ten Peacemakers in the Science-Religion Wars

By Paul Wallace

…om Answers in Genesis’ Creation Museum. The dream? Ark Encounter, a “one-of-a-kind historically themed attraction, centered on a full-size, all-wood Ark, which should become the largest timber-frame structure in the USA.” All year, I have been watching the fundraising thermometer at the Ark Park blog. It’s been moving really slowly. I wish I had recorded the data as the months rolled by, but it seems safe to say that, at current rates, it will tak…

Entitled And Enraged

By Daniel Schultz

…us is the subtle promise that believing in the American Dream makes you an American. Being American, after all, isn’t an ethnicity. Nor is it a matter of subscribing to a particular creed. It isn’t even a matter of being born in a particular geographical location. No less a “real American” than John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone. So what is the American identity? If William Cavanaugh is right, it’s a convenient fiction designed to bind…

A Lone Blogger vs. the McCain-Hagee Alliance

By Bruce Wilson

…John Hagee, assembled with the free iMovie software that came with my three-year-old MacBook [view the video at the end of this article—ed.]. In just a few days, Americans began to absorb the reality that Republican presidential candidate John McCain had sought and accepted an endorsement from a religious leader who’d asserted a divine mandate for the Holocaust and claimed that Jews themselves were responsible for the tragedy, cursed by God for th…