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Why the Church is Struggling to Hold Onto Millennial Catholics

By Kaya Oakes

…ecently, FOCUS’ training has taken place at Ave Maria University in Florida, which, along with the nearby town of the same name, was founded by Domino’s Pizza owner Tom Monaghan, a traditionalist Catholic. Monaghan said in a statement this year that his intention in founding Ave Maria was to “help bring as many souls to heaven as possible,” which makes Ave Maria a natural setting for FOCUS. Ave Maria may be a small school, with just over a thousan…

Catholic Church Bans Gay Film: This Week’s Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…of Bishops’ Film Evaluation Commission classified the film as “not advised, unusable and scabrous (indecent or salacious).” The Commission listed the film’s principal themes — described by critics as love and identity — as drugs and homosexuality. The result, according to its distributor Teodora Film, was that the film was shunned by the more than 1,100 cinemas which are owned by the Church and make up the bulk of Italy’s network of independent/a…

LGBT Editor In Bangladesh Murdered by Islamists—and More, In this Week’s Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…odds In the Los Angeles Times, Mansuy Mirovalev profiles a transgender man, Yan, who was able to transition thanks to Soviet-era regulations still in the family code that “allow a sex change after an evaluation by a commission of psychiatrists.” Still, “Yan has a harrowing reminder of how haters in Uzbekistan treat transgender people. “There’s a scar left by a screwdriver next to my liver,” the craggy-bearded and long-haired transgender man says,…

Don’t Misread Russell Moore’s Disavowal of “Christian Nation” and Anti-Trump Stance

By Daniel Schultz

…like Kim Davis. Moore wants to project an image of the SBC as conservative, yes, but living in the same world as everybody else. I’m not sure it’s fair to say that this is Moore playing politics, exactly. As I say, his comments are part of a larger effort to steer the SBC away from evangelicalism as a social identity towards a more religious identity. Given the long-term trend in American religious affiliation, it’s the right move. Any church tha…

Who’s Scared of Polygamy? A Restrained Case for the “Slippery Slope” Argument

By William E. Smith

…lead to polygamy, but whether a national debate on it will come to pass and, if so, who will be responsible for this development. These recent accounts of a possible polygamy debate do not seem to recognize that we’re in what I would call a reformation period of marriage. Nor do they seem to know that during the Protestant Reformation, which dramatically redefined marriage, polygamy was on the table. And, to me at least, it’s likely that (eventual…

It’s Not About Cake: Anti-Gay Vendors Want a Constitutional Right to Discriminate

By Sunnivie Brydum

…ding service-providers like bakeries and florists, dress-shops, hair salons, and “any number” of other businesses could claim that their services are in fact a form of constitutionally protected artistic practice. “The claim at issue here sounds as if the business can put up a sign in its window that says, ‘We sell cakes for heterosexuals only,’” Melling explained, taking ADF’s logic to its natural conclusion. “There’s an immediate consequence of…

New Report: Muslim Terrorism a ‘Minuscule Threat’

By Hussein Rashid

…decade. Per annum, it is 0.001%. If we take a more realistic number of 4 million American Muslims, the numbers become 0.005% over a decade, or 0.0005% per year. Last year there were 14,000 homicides in the U.S., and with a population of 300,000,000, that’s about 0.0005% of the population are murderers. The report ends with this sage advice: “This study’s findings challenge Americans to be vigilant against the threat of homegrown terrorism while m…

Why Religious Exemptions Matter

By Sarah Posner

…ecutive director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, said, “birth control is a fact of modern life. This proposed rule acknowledges that reality while going out of its way to accommodate religious groups.” Michael DeDora, director of Center for Inquiry’s Office of Policy, writes the group “is concerned that this is too broad and open a definition of ‘religious employer.’” He goes on: Consider just a few questions: How will…

Republicans “Evangelizing” Catholic Voters

By Patricia Miller

…—notably, claims for exemptions from serving same-sex marriage celebrations, and, in other contexts, covering reproductive health care in a company insurance plan—it’s a mistake to ignore how that conversation is driving the evangelical world. As I reported in Salon, right-leaning Catholic voters appear to be following the same path. While Catholics have long been swing voters—trending toward the GOP in the Bush years and then back to the Democrat…

Before Black Twitter: How the Early Black Press Shaped American Discourse Around Race and Religion

By Benjamin P. Fagan

…ary Ann Shadd Cary, Samuel Cornish, Philip Bell, Robert and Thomas Hamilton, and, of course, Frederick Douglass, overcame not only the standard obstacles of newspaper publishing (financing, distribution, delinquent subscribers, etc.), but also a broader white supremacist society that denied, in the most abhorrent and violent ways imaginable, the basic humanity of black people. So the very existence of antebellum black newspapers represents an abso…