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Rome Has Spoken and Rome Is Finished: The Vatican’s Sexual Abuse Summit ‘Failed Miserably’

By Mary E. Hunt

…ed minors and some covered it up. What’s so mysterious about that? A large number of minors have been sexually abused by a large number of clerics. Period. Full stop. It’s simply the beginning of a hideous story that includes the abuse of seminarians, nuns and other women, children of priests, and more, all of whom merit summits of their own. Francis’ discussion of power fell flat. He claimed that the sexual abuse of minors is an abuse of power. H…

Economy Yields Too Few Prophets

By Peter Laarman

…focus on the continued and seemingly bottomless taxpayer bailout of too-big-to-fail financial institutions as obsessive, even cranky. The criticisms fall into three categories: (1) they know what they’re doing-you’re not an expert; (2) why would you care how they revive the economy, as long as they get things moving again?; and (3) Shhhh-it’s Obama: don’t give ammunition to his enemies. Here’s my answer. There is no such thing as “the economy”: th…

The Plot to Turn the Synod into a “Plot”

By Patricia Miller

…preferred Benedict’s flair for papal bling, including his red shoes or fur-lined, ermine-trimmed winter cape). He speaks of Francis’ “maneuvers” and calls him the “chief plotter.” And he repeats the question of conservative journalist Edward Pentin’s recent book about whether last year’s synod was “rigged,” echoing its conspiratorial overtones. Of course he fails to note that Pentin’s book, which amounted to an elaborate rehashing of that questio…

Belize Overturns Sodomy Law Defended by Religious Right, Ugandan Officials Will Continue to Suppress Gay Groups, And More on the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…es at Huffington Post about his wedding to a Nigerian man in a small family-and-friends gathering in Rochester, New York at the end of July. In spite of their requests that guests not post photos on social media, someone either gave or sold photos from their wedding and first dance to a gossip blogger in Nigeria and the story spread like wildfire on Nigerian blogs. An excerpt: I felt lost. I still get a terrible feeling in my stomach just a week a…

What Fidel Castro’s Death Means for LGBT Rights in Cuba and More, in This Week’s Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…clarifying misconstructions and misinterpretations; and integrating gender-and-sexual diversity and teaching empathy from childhood onwards. But he warned the problem could not be solved without addressing both political and cultural issues. “The classic case is the variety of laws in a number of countries derived from the colonial era which still criminalize same-sex relations, even when the colonizing power discarded such laws a long time ago,”…

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

By Eric C. Miller

…at follows, Carter recounts the story of working class Christianity in turn-of-the-century Chicago, with some insights for the prospect of a progressive resurgence here and now. Your book focuses on Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when social Christianity was championed by working people rather than established clergy. In fact, the two groups were often at odds. That’s exactly right. While many think of the Social Gospel as a…

Data-Mining Denominations: Same-Sex Marriage Edition

By Daniel Schultz

…he simple hack of subtracting the number of people Strongly Opposed to same-sex marriage from the number Strongly In Favor. Not surprisingly, since the Unitarian-Universalists only had 6 percent opposed, their position on the chart hardly budged at all. Other groups traveled a little more. Mainline Baptists, for example, strongly disapprove just a little more than they strongly approve. Evangelical Baptists, on the other hand, really, really disli…

Jonestown at 40: The Real Conspiracy Is More Disturbing Than the Theories

By Rebecca Moore

…have been debunked. Matthew Thomas Farrell painstakingly assessed the mind-control account offered by John Judge, who wrote what has become the ur-text on conspiracy memes about Jonestown. An analysis of Dr. Leslie Mootoo, the Guyana pathologist who investigated the Jonestown deaths, reveals numerous discrepancies in his reports. And Jeff Brailey, who served in the military as part of the humanitarian task force assigned to remove the bodies from…

ABC’s Hit Sitcom Black-ish Does God, Pushes Theological Respectability

By Anthony B. Pinn

…an American as is embracing the idea of God. African Americans aren’t a one-theological-note people. Questioning or rejecting the idea of God doesn’t emerge out of an effort to be “white.” Rather, it comes from a desire to make sense of injustice in light of religious promises gone unfulfilled. African Americans have a long history of encounter with injustice and just as substantial a history of probing what ongoing injustice says about theologica…

What Color is Vatican Smoke?

By Marian Ronan

…e almost exclusively white women interviewed in Pink Smoke.) As the African-American students at the black seminary I attended used to say to the liberal white women who cross-registered there, “Who ‘we,’ white girl?” The pity of all this is that the exclusion of women from Roman Catholic ordination really is an injustice, one directly linked to other injustices that do indeed result in thousands of women’s deaths. This truth is acknowledged brief…