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Why Even Progressive Christianity Must Own Its Complicity in Anti-LGBT Violence

By Layton E. Williams

…, self-harm, and suicide among LGBT youth and adults. Of course, a growing number of churches and denominations today have rejected such a destructive understanding of human sexuality. Religion Dispatches recently compiled a list of the official positions on LGBT issues currently taught by various Christian denominations. According to this list, mainline Protestant denominations such as the United Church of Christ and the Episcopal Church claim th…

New Research Links Spiritual-Not-Religious to Mental Disorder

By Elizabeth Drescher

…es. Is it an existential framework in itself—something that participants in 12-step groups find without necessarily referencing religion or spirituality and that the non-religious have sorted out in other ways—rather than its structuring in specifically religious terms that is psychologically beneficial? An atheist friend put it this way: “Maybe SBNRs are going nuts because, on one frequency, they keep thinking there’s got to be something else, an…

Census Reveals Gay People are Shockingly… Normal

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

According to new census figures, the number of people reporting that they are living with a same-sex partner has risen 52 percent in the last decade. That’s almost 902,000 people who are living all across the United States. Even here in my own incredibly conservative state of South Carolina, the number of same-sex couples increased and a quarter of them are raising children. It’s those kinds of facts that have right-wing media like the Christian…

Will the Pope’s Woman Problem Alienate Young Catholics?

By Patricia Miller

…less essential to the functioning of the church. She noted that many of the 19 percent of Vatican employees who are women are in service jobs, and that there are only two women undersecretaries. In addition, Francis recently said he had no plans to appoint women to head dicasteries, which are the governing bodies of the Vatican (although four women were appointed to the commission on sex abuse that Francis created). “What governs all of this are t…

Trump is a Nightmare, Sure, But Can He Actually Do Anything?

By Sunnivie Brydum

…January, opening email yields at least one urgent call to action from any number of progressive groups. As a journalist who’s spent the better part of a decade reporting on the LGBT community, I’m no stranger to the motivational value of panicked predictions of impending legislative disasters. That kind of all-hands-on-deck organizing has long proven crucial to forming a unified front of resistance, and indeed worked well to build broad coalition…

Trump’s “Muslim Ban” A Gift to Terrorists

By Ali Olomi

…xistence in this country. In 2017 Donald Trump wants to ban Muslims, but in 1776, the founding fathers wanted to welcome them. Muslims, though a minority, have been present in the United States from the very beginning. Historians of slavery estimate that as much as a third of slaves may have been Muslim and some even fought in the revolutionary war like Yusuf ben Ali. Thomas Jefferson kept a Qur’an near his bedside and the other framers were adama…

A ‘Pro-Life’ Buttigieg Ambush, Trump’s Corrupt Counsel, and More

By Daniel Schultz

…ent of ACC Liverpool said Jan. 24 that it was dropping plans to host a June 12 Graham event, citing a number of statements by the evangelist “which we consider to be incompatible with our values.” Lest you think this is strictly a Brit thing, the same article notes that Graham has also been met with protests in Florida. He’s taken the news in typical stride: In a statement to Newsweek Jan. 28, Graham said he believes he is facing discrimination be…

Risky Business: The Pitfalls at the Corner of Church & Wall Street

By Elizabeth Drescher

…pian “class warfare” fears of Tea Partiers and other Republicans? When the number of Americans living in poverty—46.2 million, according to a recent report from the Census Bureau—is at an all-time high? When more than 300,000 Christian churches dot the American landscape, the majority with declining membership and largely unused real estate or financial capital that might well be put to work in the service of that stalwart of Christian faith: neig…

A Twisted Love Story: How American Evangelicals Helped Make Putin’s Russia and How Russia Became the Darling of the American Right

By Katherine Kelaidis

…ngelical tradition, but also conservative mainline Protestants, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, radically changed the face of Orthodox Christianity in America. Once a church almost exclusively made up of immigrants and their descendants, these Americans with no historical ties to Orthodoxy, became a majority in a number of Orthodox jurisdictions in the United States and brought with them their cultural baggage—most importantly the Culture Wars….

The Story Behind the Catholic Church’s Stunning Reversal on Contraception

By Patricia Miller

…iage, further hardened its insistence on the procreative purpose of sex. By 1400, Augustine’s doctrine on contraception was the rule within the church. Despite its longevity, Cahill wasn’t the only Catholic woman questioning the teaching on birth control. In 1964, another budding theologian named Rosemary Radford Ruether published an article entitled “A Catholic Mother Tells: Why I Believe in Birth Control” in the Saturday Evening Post, bringing t…