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Even Tougher Questions to Ask Mormon Presidential Candidates

By Joanna Brooks

…ry, despite the fact that Church founder Joseph Smith initially ordained African-American men. How were you raised to understand the Church’s priesthood ban, and how do you now view it? Was the LDS Church wrong to withhold priesthood from men of African descent? As members of a minority religion, Mormons like Romney and Huntsman have learned to be very pragmatic in the way they manage the relationship between personal faith and public decision-m…

Presbyterians, Change Hearts & Minds, Begin Ordaining Gays

By MaryAnn McKibben Dana

…d ran a 50-state, all-173-presbytery campaign.” This included church-based phone banks; ads in national Presbyterian magazines; and letter-writing and story-telling campaigns using traditional mail as well as social media [YouTube, Facebook, Twitter]. “We [also] found church leaders who had changed their mind about homosexuality—what they had been taught about the Bible—and shared their stories in these national ads and through social media,” Adee…

Secularist Activists Are Being Murdered in Bangladesh: An Ongoing Crisis Causes Many to Flee

By Michael De Dora

…s inspiration—a Wahhabi version of Islam fomented in the country’s growing number of fundamentalist religious schools—the victims are not necessarily homogenous in their religious beliefs. Attacks in Bangladesh have targeted atheists and apostates, yes, but what victims have generally shared is something more fundamental: a willingness to live according to the dictates of their own consciences, and to pursue an open, pluralistic, and democratic so…

Are All Religious Experiences Reducible to 16 Desires?

By Andrew Aghapour

…ple throughout the world, from many cultures in Europe, Asia, and North America. We asked them about every possible thing that could motivate them, and then we take their answers and analyze them statistically. The results show that there are 16 psychological forces that motivate people. All human motives are a combination of these 16 psychological forces. Nothing important is left out. It’s a comprehensive list. The others, like Freud—he didn’t d…

Pro- and Anti-Muslim Sentiment in Gainesville

By Julie Ingersoll

…ponses to the planned Qur’an burning in Afghanistan to the responses of American Christians to desecration of their sacred symbols, completely ignoring the distinctly different political contexts. Another identified himself as a Christian of a distinct stripe by advocating burning phone books that advertise abortion and then said he doesn’t have a Qur’an but if he did he would “feed it page by page to (his) goat who would be impervious to its lies…

The Real Mormon Moment

By Joanna Brooks

…courts for more than a decade. We used the internet to regroup and grow in numbers. The Church even developed its own web-based resources to acknowledge and address its own controversies—historic and contemporary. This, we thought, was a good sign. A sign that might not need to fear losing our membership, our place, in a cherished tradition, just for having and voicing questions, doubts, and differences. We told ourselves to not to be afraid. And…

What Liberals Want: A Response to Susan Thistlethwaite

By Frances Kissling

…erate element of dysfunctional family, hurt feelings, ego tripping, and clericalism that goes on. We can’t face each other. And so Thistlethwaite holds forth in “On Faith” but does not pick up the phone and call Peter. And Peter in turn rails against Wallis who in turn ignores everyone he does not think is more powerful than he (there I just did it; I was nasty). Thistlethwaite suggests that the differences are actually about strategy. Liberals de…

Bad News for LGBT Anglicans, Mormons, Adventists, Norwegians, Russians, Georgians, Egyptians, Kuwaitis, Saudis…

By Peter Montgomery

…ublishes Memoir In response to a parliamentary question this week, South African President Jacob Zuma refused to condemn Uganda’s anti-gay law, writing, “South Africa respects the sovereign rights of other countries to adopt their own legislation. Also this week, Edwin Cameron, an openly gay judge who joined South Africa’s Constitutional Court in 2009, launched a book that traces his personal journey as well as the country’s journey toward justice…

The Brutality of the American Eden

By Paul Harvey

…y a story of how religion has interacted with some of the big events of American history. American religious expression—its music and art, its stories of internal spiritual quests, its embodiment, its wild profusion of utopian groups, its history of ritual practices—will have to be found elsewhere. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. God knows, while Glenn Beck rants in Twitter-like aphorisms condensing David Barton’s execrable version of h…

Cross-Burning Hearing Ends, Trial Set to Begin

By Lauri Lebo

…here the records were kept. When plaintiffs requested a hearing to discuss sanctions, Hamilton was unable to attend the meeting because he had not one, but two flat tires. The trial is scheduled to begin July 26. I’ll be honest, every time I think of the case, I just feel sad. From the moment Freshwater feared losing his job, he has tried to present himself as a martyr to religious discrimination. He has argued that the case has been about the fac…