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Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, and Pro-Home Birth

By Katherine Don

…g to do with killing a baby.” “Choice” and “Informed Consent” During the 1970s, an era perceived as the heyday of “crunchy” home birth advocacy, the divide between pro-life and pro-choice midwives was less conspicuous and presented fewer pragmatic problems since midwives tended to work in confined communities. “At that time, you had very religious conservative Christians practicing home births, and then you also had this hippie movement, these…

Religion Round-Up: What’s Going on in Religion Around the World

By Diane Winston

…are, according to Pew, surprisingly high. Moreover, they represent a large number of people, “nearly equal the estimated number of religiously affiliated adults in the United States” Accordingly, the 1-plus % of the Chinese population that identifies itself as Muslim equals some 20.3 million people—a population almost as large as Saudi Arabia’s. (More to the point, as one of China’s ethnic minorities, Muslims are not bound to the one-child per fam…

Pope’s US Visit Provokes Intense Attention; New Vatican Book on Man-Woman Complementarity & New Int’l Report on Christian Role Models for LGBT Equality; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…nity,” he said. Homosexuality is illegal in Uganda and publishable by up to 14 years in jail. A number of laws have attempted to punish homosexuality with more severe consequences including death, but those bills have folded under international pressure. While activists say the foundation of the bill is fundamentally discriminatory, they also say that successful lobbying campaigns have helped introduce possible amendments that strip the bill of it…

Why Religious Exemptions Matter

By Sarah Posner

…le for the exemption. This will, Catholics for Choice argues, increase the number of employees of Catholic organizations who would be deprived of contraception coverage, even if they aren’t Catholic themselves (or are Catholics who dissent from the church’s opposition to birth control). HHS notes in its rule that “the exemption should not exclude group health plans of religious entities that would qualify for the exemption but for the fact that,…

Why the Church is Struggling to Hold Onto Millennial Catholics

By Kaya Oakes

…tholic millennials participating in church culture is “in fact, grim.” Only 16% of millennials self-identify as Catholic according to Pew. That 16% is the group the church is struggling to hold on to. So if they are increasingly choosing the liberal side in the culture wars, are they really still Catholic? Canon Law 204.1 states that a Catholic not only has to be baptized, but also “share the profession of faith, the sacraments, and ecclesiastical…

Church and State in Japan: The Case of the Yasukuni Shrine

By Mark R. Mullins

…month during the Fall Festival. Emboldened by the Prime Minister’s actions, 195 Diet members made a group visit to Yasukuni the following day (these politicians belong to a group within the Diet organized in 1981 to encourage regular visits and support of the Yasukuni Shrine). Koizumi’s behavior also provoked widespread international concern. The governments of South Korea and the Peoples’ Republic of China issued strong official statements and cr…

New Report: Muslim Terrorism a ‘Minuscule Threat’

By Hussein Rashid

…the span of a 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 terr…

Mormonism’s Black Issues

By Joanna Brooks

…and prohibited them the Priesthood,” a position he reaffirmed in a January 16, 1852 statement to the Utah territorial legislature: Any man having one drop of the seed of [Cain]… in him cannot hold the priesthood and if no other Prophet ever spake it before I will say it now in the name of Jesus Christ I know it is true and others know it. Another rationale for Mormon discrimination against African Americans was articulated in 1845 by Mormon Apost…

Cruz and the Evangelical Illusion

By Sarah Posner

…“We brought them with no expectations and we were highly pleased with the number who decided Ted is the right man to be of the president of the U.S.” When judging these statements (particularly the words “very diverse,” “significant standing” and “the number”), keep in mind that Barton is known (among evangelicals) for playing fast and loose with facts. Three years ago, the evangelical publisher Thomas Nelson halted publication of one of Barton’s…

Who Bombed the Boston Marathon?

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…ted. Only 149 groups existed before Obama was elected in 2008. In 2012 the number had expanded to 1,360. Not all are plotting terrorist attacks, of course. But some are. In September 2012, Daryl Johnson, a terrorist analyst for the US Department of Homeland Security testified before a Senate committee that there was an “upsurge” of potentially violent non-Islamic extremist activity in the United States. So fingers point toward right-wing Christian…