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Pope Francis Says Teaching Gender Is Nasty; Far-Right Religious Groups Helping Mexico’s Anti-Equality Movement; Colombia’s Peace Deal Killed by Anti-LGBT Campaign?; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…examines courts’ record on protecting rights of LGBT people Equal Rights Trust released “Justice or Complicity: LGBT Rights and the Russian Courts.” From a press release: Justice or Complicity? examines judicial practice on issues ranging from homophobic and transphobic violence to restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly. It also reviews cases dealing with discrimination in areas including family and private life, work and education. A…

6 Overlooked Takeaways From a Reviewer of Controversial Texas Textbooks

By David R. Brockman

…., the East-West Schism, the Inquisition, etc.) For example, the Catholic crusade against the Cathars, a heretical Christian sect, lasted two decades; one battle, the siege of Béziers, resulted in the massacre of thousands, including clerics, women, and children. Nor do the history standards ask students to show how, say, Islam was “a unifying factor” in the Muslim world, or Confucianism was “a unifying factor” in China. Another standard locates t…

The Breaking of Biblical Womanhood: The Problem With the Hot New Book Taking Aim at the Subjugation of Women in Evangelicalism

By Jill Hicks-Keeton

…Baptist Bible’s authority. Its removal requires deeper excavation. Barr’s words at times suggest a similar precarity. Her frequent use of “as a historian, I know…” obscures that she’s also doing theology without claiming theological authority. I can’t help but wonder if this rhetorical distancing is a relic of the ideology she and I both inherited about who is permitted to speak authoritatively about God-things. We are historians, not theologians…

Does Mormonism Encourage LDS People to Lie?

By Joanna Brooks

…ce polygamy? A few weeks ago, I sat in front of a radio microphone for the BBC program “The World”; with me on the program was a high-ranking public relations official for the LDS Church. Together, we did the same program twice: two back-to-back hours of the same hour about Mormonism, one time for the American audiences, and a second time for the whole world. During the first hour, taping for American audiences, when the inevitable polygamy questi…

Conservative Catholics Unhappy About New Book on LGBTs and The Church; and More in the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…onor and dignity of Muslims, residents of Chechnya, Russian citizens.” The Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, which broke the story, says it has since faced threats. An adviser to Kadryov called the paper’s staff “enemies of our faith and of our country.” In other news, Pink News reports that bloggers using the Live Journal platform are being forced to abide by Russia’s anti-gay “propaganda” law now that its servers have been transferred to Russia;…

Eclipseville, USA: The Birthplace of ‘Little Green Men’ Proudly Hosts The Point of Greatest Eclipse

By Matthew Bowman

…ature fears of the Cold War: shadowy forces beyond her family’s control disrupting their lives in ways they barely understood. “My daddy didn’t like how people treated him once the story got out,” Stith told the reporter Maria Carter. “People made fun of him. It was traumatizing.” On the other hand, to much of the rest of America the Hopkinsville incident was mostly of interest because of what it said about Hopkinsville. At some point, a reporter…

Telling the World a ‘Big Story’: RD in Conversation with Karen Armstrong

By Laurie Patton

…ut what we can know about the historical Jesus and what we can’t, and what words he said and what words he didn’t say. And this kind of knowledge about religions can be abused. People will quote scripture out of context, and having that knowledge of what the scripture is really about helps them. And so for these reasons it is really important to have that scholarly voice in the public domain. Yes, and people come to that longing for knowledge beca…

Marriage Vote ‘Transforms’ Not-So-Catholic Ireland; Activist to Malaysian PM – ‘Love Is Not Terrorism’; LGBTs Find Growing Acceptance in Colombia, Not At World Meeting of Families; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…rtent invitation to murder. In a column previewing the UN meeting, the New York Times’ Frank Bruni spoke with US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power: “We’re trying to get it into the DNA so that when you’re talking about minorities or vulnerable groups, you would always have L.G.B.T. people included,” Power said. There has been a commendable acceleration of that effort since September 2011, when Barack Obama, in an address to the U.N. General Asse…

Pricking the Conscience of Churches: From AIDS Activism to Ending World Hunger

By Susan Henking

…I find especially enjoyable are the wonderful people I meet throughout the world. Truly those persons engaged in ending AIDS and hunger are caring, compassionate people. The volunteers that assist me are truly the “salt of the earth,” and the most caring, compassionate people I know. The persons we are privileged to partner with in Africa and Asia and elsewhere are really good people. When you are helping AIDS orphans in Kenya or assisting women a…

Church=State in Putin’s Orthodox Empire?; Evangelical-Orthodox Anti-Gay Alliance; Malaysian Court Protects Transwomen; Catholicism (Still) Declining in Latin America; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…d to attend Islamic religious classes and promise to stop being trans. The New York Times’ Thomas Fuller has more: Although lawyers described Friday’s decision as a landmark judgment, it was also circumscribed, according to Fahri Azzat, a lawyer representing the three hairdressers who brought the case. The judgment is subject to appeal and is only applicable in Negeri Sembilan. Transgender bans in other Malaysian states remain intact, Mr. Fahri sa…