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The Lesser and the Greater Pilgrimage

By Amina Wadud

…icion that I would be more like myself and not so overwhelmed by the sheer numbers. I had stuck with this plan—umrah any time of the year, the further from the three sacred months the better, and then hajj some other year—until my recent stay in Indonesia. I met an Indonesian fashion designer who had one of those life-altering experiences about 15 years ago, after flaunting around in Milan, Italy, where she studied fashion. From that moment on, sh…

Trump Doesn’t Need to “Pivot” if Evangelicals Do it For Him

By Paul Harvey

…ht stalwart Gary Bauer warmed up the audience by comparing the election to Flight 93, a new standard even for the hyperbolic rhetoric of evangelical supporters of Trump, who previously have called his rhetoric “Churchillian” and warned that this election could be the final nail in the coffin of American liberty. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a Flight 93 election. This may be our last shot. It’s time to roll. It’s time to run down the aisle and sav…

Norwegian Catholic Church May Stop Civil Marriages; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…und and spiritual for me.” France: Gay Flight Attendants Seek Opt Out From Flights to Iran Earlier this month, gay flights attendants for Air France sought the ability to opt out of working flights on a new route to Tehran; female flight attendants were previously given that option after some objected to the requirement that they wear a head scarf when deplaning in Iran. Malaysia: Top Cop Says LGBT People Cannot Be Police A top law enforcement off…

The Bleeding Heart of Muslim Europe

By Haroon Moghul

…as Yugoslav, and most recently almost destroyed. And today? As I board the flight to Sarajevo, I’m not sure if I should expect a post-Soviet wasteland, an eerily quiet former war zone, or something else. The flight, though, is reassuringly undistinguished. There are lots of Bosnians, white and Western enough to pass for everyday Americans, though the occasional hijabs might throw you off. There are a few Americans, who seem to be intrepid backpack…

The Pope’s Gay Priests

By William J. Dohar

…this pope. Just how much dancing is required became apparent after the in-flight chat with journalists and Francis’ now-famous statement: “if a person is gay and seeks the Lord and has goodwill, well who am I to judge them?” When it comes to making trouble in the dioceses, Francis is practicing what he preaches. Many bishops in this country went into containment mode, issuing statements to their local churches about what the pope had said and es…

Oh Say, Can You See?: 9/11 Flag Displays and the Flag’s Symbolic Power

By Spencer Dew

…is to convey the enormity of the loss of life, to make otherwise abstract numbers visible. In the Oak Brook commemoration, each flag has attached to it a brief biography of the person killed, with color-coded ribbons differentiating civilians and flight crews from first responders. Orlando, Florida, on the logic that far more were injured in both visible and “invisible” ways, has opted to erect 250,000 flags. It is not death that is primary here,…

The Man in the Red Dress: My Unlikely Friendship with Cardinal Francis George

By Cathleen Falsani

…man secure in his mortality, I thought as I craned my neck to look for the flight attendant refilling wine glasses. I recalled that unflinching newspaper when I learned Cardinal George had died last week after a lengthy battle with cancer, a disease he’d beaten twice before in the years since I left Chicago and the newspaper job that often put me in his company—whether I’d been invited or not. Cardinal George (or “Frannie G,” as some of us media c…

I Volunteer to Root Out Christian Extremism

By Peter Laarman

…rtheless put the number at roughly 338,000. I am willing to work with this number until a better one comes along. Of this number, roughly 8,000 congregations claim upwards of 1,000 members; most are smaller, indeed most are much smaller. My concept is this: I think we can create a Christian Honor Corps (CHC) of perhaps 10,000 persons. Persons like myself who take our responsibility to monitor Christian extremist thought seriously and who are willi…

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

By Eric C. Miller

…ments 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 predominated by the foreign born, repeatedly took its protest to the streets, Protestant leaders called for vio…

A Reforming Tradition Struggles With Change

By Brent Hege

…onal ministers, associates in ministry, and deaconesses, and currently the number of women and men preparing for ministry in ELCA seminaries is roughly equal (Susan Candea, “Wisdom Has Blessed Us”). While there are certainly some in the ELCA who continue to oppose women’s ordination, those numbers are small and grow smaller with each passing year. The same, I suspect, will be the case for the issue of gay and lesbian ordination forty years from no…