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Ordaining Mormon Women Would End Joyful Diversity

By Holly Welker

…w much poorer the world would be if all the Buddhists and Taoists I met in Asia renounced their beliefs and traditions to adopt mine. I felt guilty about not sharing other missionaries’ enthusiasm for changing people. Here’s another shocking statement: A concern many advocates of female ordination have is that because men “have” the priesthood and women “don’t,” the blessings of the priesthood are being withheld from women. At age 12, because they…

Trump’s ‘Sh*thole Countries’ is Just a Cruder Term for What’s Been Said in American Churches for Generations

By Kathryn Gin Lum

…shitholes—whether of the “Jungle,” “Desert,” “Poor/Hungry,” “Commie,” or “iPhone Factory” variety. The “Shithole World Map” is clearly meant to be funny, but that doesn’t mean it’s parody. The map reflects an American-centric view of the world that the 45th president stoked. Trump’s followers weren’t delighting in simply shocking and outraging “the libs”; they were reaching back to a longer tradition of how to see the world—one with deep roots in…

The Mormon Moment?

By Joanna Brooks

…e Church’s growth being among US Latinos and in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, tensions between the political and economic interests of the Church’s white, multi-generational American core and its global membership are increasing. Recent political efforts by the LDS Church to support a suite of moderate immigration reform measures in the state of Utah evidence the growing influence of Latino Mormons in the Church. And they point to a future of m…

Strange Bedfellows: The American Far-Right and Today’s Jihad Do Have Something in Common — Just Not What You Think

By Suzanne Schneider

…wage a domestic counterpart. The pursuit of security through state violence has not yet yielded the promised peace in the Middle East, North Africa, or Central Asia. There’s no reason to believe this strategy will bear less bitter fruit on the homefront….

Australia’s Harsh Refugee Policies Stirring Backlash; Malawi Court Sides With Pastors To Lift Moratorium on Sodomy Prosecutions; Uzbek President Says God Has Taken Gays’ Reason Away; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…icial system to accomplish this,” said Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “For years, the government has been demonizing human rights groups and stifling them with bureaucracy. Now it’s starting to shut them down.” Kenya: Man faces 14 years in prison for ‘sexting’ A Kenyan man, Godfrey Mburu, faces 14 years in prison after “sexting” a male journalist, reports Joe Williams at Pink News: The reporter – who has n…

A New Goal for Anti-Choice Activists: Targeting “Sex-Selective” Abortion

By Andy Kopsa

…mony about PRENDA as an anti-woman wolf in pro-woman sheep’s clothing by a number of advocates. This from Miriam W. Yeung, Executive Director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum: PRENDA pretends to speak the language of women’s equality, but, unfortunately, the voting records of its supporters do not strengthen civil rights, women’s rights, or the rights of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. For example, this year alone, spons…

Ahmadi Muslim Community Doesn’t Speak For All Muslims

By Hussein Rashid

…s. The Ahmadis are a movement that originated in the 19th century in South Asia. They are generally considered to be the first group to come to the United States in an organized way and were heavily involved in converting African-Americans to Islam in the early part of the 20th century. In Pakistan, they are targeted by certain sectors as being heretics. This history of being a persecuted minority, but also being fairly cosmopolitan, should increa…

Mormon Numbers Not Adding Up

By Joanna Brooks

…ss of the self-identified Mormon core. But taken together the Pew and ARIS numbers suggest that while the highly active LDS core is highly self-assured, it may also be shrinking—a fact not immediately evident in Church membership statistics. The numbers also suggest that cultural or heritage identity sense of Mormonism may be weakening, especially at the margins of the core and among those who disaffiliate. That may be bad news for twenty-first ce…

Competitive Religious Philanthropy in the Wake of the Nepali Earthquake

By Nalika Gajaweera

…re could easily be chalked up to a diplomatic gesture from one small South Asian nation to another, but the humanitarian gesture is rooted in the long-running transcultural exchange between Sri Lanka and Nepal as major historical sites of Buddhism. “It is indeed our duty to help Nepal in this crisis,” a prominent Buddhist clergyman said. “It is a Hindu state with a considerable number of Buddhists living there. It is the place where the Bodhisattv…

What Do Islamophobes Have in Common with the Taliban?

By John Feffer

…valent today. To understand Islamophobia in other parts of the world—South Asia, Africa—I would have had to immerse myself in the history and cultures of those parts of the world, and frankly I am just not familiar enough with those regions to undertake such an inquiry. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic? The biggest misconception is that Islamophobes are only concerned about Muslim extremists. In fact, the most prominent…