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Pope’s US Visit Provokes Intense Attention; New Vatican Book on Man-Woman Complementarity & New Int’l Report on Christian Role Models for LGBT Equality; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ndment Defense Act, which would allow clerks like Kim Davis and bakers and florists and others to deny services to gay and lesbian couples. Also sitting right before Francis during his address to Congress were three of the five Supreme Court justices — a majority of the majority — who ruled for marriage equality in June: Justices Sotomayor, Ginsburg and Kennedy. The pope had his big chance to be clear and emphatic about the terrible thing they’d s…

What’s in a Name? Religious Nones and the American Religious Landscape

By Richard Flory

…publicly proclaim their disbelief. These reactions to the increase in the number of people classified as “religious Nones” represent an assumption based on a market approach of religion and an understanding of religion as a binary reality. Just like any other business, success in the religious marketplace is the goal, and it is measured by the number of people who identify with your particular brand of religion (or irreligion as the case may be)….

Workers Once Forced the Social Gospel Into Churches—Can It Happen Again?

By Eric C. Miller

…of progressive reform. Clergy of nearly every denomination eyed the era’s fledgling working-class movements with deep suspicion and, in many cases, outright alarm. There were a number of reasons for this. Protestant ministers enjoyed close ties—social, political, financial, and more—to Chicago’s industrial elite, which predisposed them to be skeptical of trade unionism. In the turbulent 1870s and 1880s, as the rank and file, increasingly predomin…

Rome Has Spoken and Rome Is Finished: The Vatican’s Sexual Abuse Summit ‘Failed Miserably’

By Mary E. Hunt

…ed minors and some covered it up. What’s so mysterious about that? A large number of minors have been sexually abused by a large number of clerics. Period. Full stop. It’s simply the beginning of a hideous story that includes the abuse of seminarians, nuns and other women, children of priests, and more, all of whom merit summits of their own. Francis’ discussion of power fell flat. He claimed that the sexual abuse of minors is an abuse of power. H…

RD News Round-Up—Oct.14, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…on 8 donations from Brad Pitt, Steven Spielberg, and PG&E—has aggravated a number of Christian Right leaders including Randy Thomasson, the head of the Campaign for Children and Families (CCF), who has called for a boycott of Google. “There needs to be a response from people who will say, ‘I’m not going to put a dime of my money or time into businesses that are attacking the sacred institution of marriage,’” Thomasson told the AFA’s OneNewsNow. As…

How Not To Defend Atheism

By Vlad Chituc

…tingly worse, other atheists have been calling Silverman out for falsely inflating the number of atheists for more than four years. And last year, I specifically asked Silverman if he would stop reporting the stats on “nones” as being representative of atheism, and he told me he would. Yet here we are. There’s a philosopher at the UC Riverside I admire named Eric Schwitzgebel. One of his more popular theories is his theory of jerks, which he defin…

Religion Round-Up: What’s Going on in Religion Around the World

By Diane Winston

…are, according to Pew, surprisingly high. Moreover, they represent a large number of people, “nearly equal the estimated number of religiously affiliated adults in the United States” Accordingly, the 1-plus % of the Chinese population that identifies itself as Muslim equals some 20.3 million people—a population almost as large as Saudi Arabia’s. (More to the point, as one of China’s ethnic minorities, Muslims are not bound to the one-child per fam…

How a Powerful ‘Ex-Gay’ Pastor is Chasing the Latino Vote

By Katherine Stewart

…ic and Pentecostal vein, and these are explicitly multiracial movements. A number of the more farsighted leaders are therefore making a conscious effort to include and empower nonwhite individuals and groups. At the very least, they are doing what they can to collect their votes. Jim Domen is one such leader. A California pastor and the founder of a group called Church United, he has built his voter-outreach machine around the idea of racial inclu…

To Be Queer, Gifted, and Black: A Conversation with Theologian Pamela Lightsey

By Nyasha Junior

…oung persons will read it and will take courage from it. I’ve heard from a number of young LGBTQ persons, black especially, who thank me for the book and said they have wanted a resource like this for some time to combat some of the negative statements that they hear on the regular basis, particularly within the churches, within the churches that they love. I’m telling them to not receive that putrid narrative that God doesn’t love you into your b…

Belize Overturns Sodomy Law Defended by Religious Right, Ugandan Officials Will Continue to Suppress Gay Groups, And More on the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…awn loud complaints from some of the country’s bishops, as the greatest conflict between the Mexican government and the Catholic Church since the Cristero War. Catholic Church: Progressive Catholics and LGBT activists respond to Pope’s gender comments New Ways Ministry’s Bob Shine collects a number of responses to Pope Francis’ comments attacking “gender ideology” when speaking to Polish bishops two weeks ago. Among them is Faith in America’s Elie…