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Catholic Bishops Meeting For Family Synod; South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church OKs Gay Weddings, Ordination; Court in Malaysia Deals Setback To Transgender Advocates; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…fairs Council. Kyrgyzstan: Anti-gay law could provoke copy-cats throughout Asia Shawn Gaylord writes in the Advocate that anti-gay legislation under consideration in Kyrgyzstan “would set a new and frightening precedent with the potential to reignite a wave of anti-LGBT legislation in its region.” This small Central Asian country is on the verge of passing a law that would be the first of its kind — a “propaganda” law that would result in people b…

Is ‘Western Self-Hatred’ the Problem in the Gaza War Protest Movement?

By Shaul Magid

…The “East-West” dichotomy is itself a product of colonialism (do people in Asia see themselves as living in “the East”?). The notion of the Left being “anti-West,” therefore, only feeds a colonial model that in some ways points to the problem. It’s the West’s conversational hegemony that labels anything opposing it “anti-” (as if to imply “anti-civilization”). The categories are no longer useful. Persico’s “anti-West” example is Michel Foucault’s…

A One-State Solution for Israel and Why It Will Work

By Haroon Moghul

…t ideologues. But not all of them. Some settlers prefer the convenience of cheaper housing, without any apparent concern for how their desire for an affordable place to live jeopardizes the security of their country and the viability of their state. And that’s not even getting to Gaza. All this trouble, with the continued delusion that somehow it can be sustained, somehow it’ll be made to work, somehow if we just bomb them every few years, and pun…

Ross Douthat’s Missing Pregnant Women

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…ity reduces fertility. But compared with the swiftly aging nations of East Asia and Western Europe, the American birth rate has proved consistently resilient, hovering around the level required to keep a population stable or growing over the long run. “It’s a near-universal law that modernity reduces fertility” is a grand-sounding observation, isn’t it? So beautifully unimpeachable. It feels like we’re talking about any old inverse relationship: m…

How Breivik’s “Cultural Analysis” is Drawn from the “Christian Worldview”

By Sarah Posner

…om its traditional heartland: south into black Africa, east into Southeast Asia and the Philippines, north into Europe. And also West: the fastest-growing religion in the United States is Islam. Islam’s thrust northward into Europe, the heartland of Western culture, is worth a closer look. Islamic immigration into France has been so massive as to reverse the verdict of the battle of Tours; southern France now has more mosques than churches. Noebel…

International Protest of Anti-Gay Persecution in Chechnya Grows; more in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…momentum toward marriage equality Taiwan’s move toward becoming the first Asian country to embrace marriage equality has sparked a “bitter backlash” that leaves the future of marriage in doubt, reports Emily Rauhala at the Washington Post: For years now, these islands have been at the forefront of Asia’s gay rights movement. While Singapore criminalizes gay sex and China cracks down on LGBT organizing, Taiwan has moved toward inclusion: Gays and…

Sex Comes For the Archbishop: Rembert Weakland’s Unflinching Memoir

By Mary E. Hunt

…tern Europe, all over Latin America, as well as throughout Western Europe, Asia, North America, and Australia. It read like good training for being Pope, if you ask me. Weakland was a contemporary and friend of the Jesuit’s beloved leader Pedro Arrupe. It was Rembert Weakland who gave Thomas Merton’s still-warm body the last rites when he died in Thailand. Benedictine life obviously agreed with him since it allowed him a long leash and many short…

Pro-Gay Marriage Mormon Keeps Faith Despite Church Pressure

By Joanna Brooks

…and within days an official at LDS Church headquarters placed a concerned phone call to Melanie S.’s local clergy. Three times her bishop met with Melanie to discuss the video. Because she had affiliated with “Mormons for Marriage,” he questioned whether or not Melanie and her husband should be allowed to keep their temple recommends—certificates that allow the most worthy and devoted Mormons to participate in the faith’s sacred temple rites. Nor…

Joyless Primaries Grind On

By Joanna Brooks

…g, highly observant LDS father. My friend described a brief, tension-laden phone call between father and son, wedged into a few free minutes after a church meeting. “Now, I’m going to serve my family,” said the father, bringing the call to a close. “Because that’s what I do.” And Mitt Romney is going to serve his country. Because that’s what he does. Like it or not. That joyless put-your-shoulder-to-the-wheel tenacity is setting the tone for the G…

Oprah, Terrorist Cells, and the Meaning of Life: An Interview with Paul Froese

By Andrew Aghapour

…r of the Baylor Religion Surveys. The Cubit recently reached out to him by phone to discuss purpose, religion in modernity, and the brilliance of Tony Robbins. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. In your book you argue that modernity has brought about a kind of existential confusion, and you discovered this in an interesting way: by comparing levels of happiness and purposefulness to per-capita GDP. Could you tell us more abou…