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Meeting on the Bridge: Fr. James Martin’s Ministry to LGBT Catholics Becomes a Book

…to get more upset about these things until I realized a couple of things. Number one, not everyone’s going to like you. Number two, engaging with these people in arguments is often fruitless. Number three, a lot of times they refuse to listen. And number four, a very small percentage of them are actually crazy. There’s a great scene in a movie called The Trouble with Angels from the 1960s. It’s about a Catholic girls’ school outside of Philadelph…

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The Gospel Church and the Ruining of Gay Lives: An Interview with Anthony Heilbut

…, and then I say, thinking of all the ruined gay lives, this really is the number that no man can number. It’s also interesting to me that “Writing It Out” is followed by the section “War on the Children.” Such an organization suggests that the latter was a reaction against the former—that as these voices emerge, there’s this really virulent reaction culturally against them.  And also it’s so very political. As the church has become more right-win…

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

…-winner “Spotlight” which deals with clerical sex abuse in Boston and was classified as “complex.” Only very rarely does the guidance make it clear the Church does not want a film shown at all with the only other recent example being Chilean director Pablo Larrain’s “El Club”, in which the main characters are all Catholic priests, including one with a history of sexually abusing children. The Church’s lingering influence in Italian public life was…

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Is Torture Utilitarian?

…ms. And that leads to some very bizarre moral reasoning. Utilitarianism is number-crunching, but of a very peculiar kind; in its crudest forms, it seems to imply that you can measure pleasure and pain, and that by maximizing the pleasure of the greatest number of people, you may be able to justify the infliction of pain on a select few. We see that strange logic at work in these memoranda. First, the CIA justified waterboarding with the “ticking t…

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Why We Must Reclaim “Religious Freedom” from Christian Conservatives

…ments against recognition of interracial marriage and relationships in the last century) is that a business discriminating against same-sex couples is exercising a reasonable extension of their religious opposition to marriage equality. State legislation that included the Hobby Lobby principle in this way has been attempted in several states, but has so far only been enacted in Mississippi. A Hobby Lobby-type bill that passed in Indiana was later…

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Liberty University’s In-House Conversion ‘Therapist’ Retires, But Will the Christian School Cease This Discredited Practice?

…nd thousands of sons.” This disturbing sentiment hints at the overwhelming number of students who were habitually subjugated to Emerick’s chaotic work. The question, however, remains: While neither he nor Liberty referred to him as a therapist of any kind, how was it legal for Emerick, someone who’s not a licensed therapist, to get away with offering such services? The first part of the answer is that for the majority of the time Emerick was offer…

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

…d a second wife. He did so, moreover, only after getting the approval of a number of important Protestant theologians, including Martin Luther. This case and other developments around polygamy in the 16th and 17th centuries are chronicled by John Cairncross. What Lyndal Roper has said about experimenting with marriage in the Reformation holds true for our time too. We have been busy overhauling our marital system at least as thoroughly as happened…

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Republicans “Evangelizing” Catholic Voters

…Catholicism, is in many ways the most traditional Catholic of the sizeable number of Catholics jostling for the GOP nod. Bobby Jindal has labeled himself a “Catholic Evangelical” and even hosted “The Response,” a prayer extravaganza that amounts to a full-out paean to Christian nationalism. Rick Santorum has long courted the Christian right with his anti-abortion rhetoric and was once named by Time magazine as one of the nation’s “25 Most Influent…

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The Great Secret of Constitutional Law: Why Proposition 8 Will (and perhaps should) Be Upheld

…of same-sex marriage, legislative reform efforts were gaining ground in a number of states. Granted, these were usually modest civil union compromises, but they were not sparking the kind of backlash that led to the Proposition 8 effort in California. Such statutory reform could have laid the foundation for further legal development toward full recognition of the right to marry. In retrospect, the federal courts were probably wise to avoid any su…

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Awakening, Counter-Awakening, and the End of Church

…xploring their spirituality in different ways.’ I think eventually a large number of those people will re-affiliate in some way, shape, or form—but when they do, the actual institutions of religion will be very different because of the demands those people make on new kinds of churches. I look at that whole arc of people who are leaving church because of the failure of the institution, and I don’t see that as threatening. I see that as a really ex…

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