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More Mixed Signals from Pope Francis; Church of England Wrestles with Rifts; Faith Groups Lobby Pro & Con on Irish Referendum; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…artners in Israel,” notes the Times. “Civil marriage does not exist in the country, where the solemnization of marriage is entirely controlled by the state rabbinate, and homosexual unions are not in themselves recognized.” Vietnam: Couple marries on airplane flight A Vietnamese lesbian couple celebrated a Valentine’s Day wedding on a Vietjet flight from Ho Chi Minh City to Bangkok. Pink News notes, “Same-sex marriage is not legally recognized in…

The Pope’s Gay Priests

By William J. Dohar

…risy to contend with. This points to the second curious reaction from most American bishops regarding Francis’ comments. They were careful to avoid the very topic that had brought Francis’ comments to light in the first place: gay priests. Nearly every statement that I came across veered far from the topic, finding safety not only in the church’s “unbroken tradition on homosexuality,” but in the comforting and inaccurate dichotomy of “us versus t…

What Passover Taught Me About Being Black

By A. E. Brooks-Key

…the urban centers of America, favelas of Brazil, shanties of Jamaica, and reservations of the American West. For years, I would anticipate the arrival of spring and Passover season. Meticulously cleaning my house of leaven as I awaited this celebration of freedom. Now when I watched The Ten Commandments I was once again rooting for Moses (albeit a white one) and the Hebrews as they dueled with Ramses and the Egyptians. But then something unexpect…

I Volunteer to Root Out Christian Extremism

By Peter Laarman

…rtheless put the number at roughly 338,000. I am willing to work with this number until a better one comes along. Of this number, roughly 8,000 congregations claim upwards of 1,000 members; most are smaller, indeed most are much smaller. My concept is this: I think we can create a Christian Honor Corps (CHC) of perhaps 10,000 persons. Persons like myself who take our responsibility to monitor Christian extremist thought seriously and who are willi…

Excerpt: The Christian Roots of Zionism

By Shalom Goldman

…omeland was overwhelming. As would sometimes be forgotten, it was not just American Jews who where stirred by the prospect of a new nation for the Jewish people, it was most of America.’’ In 1948 President Truman, in keeping with American public opinion, granted Israel diplomatic recognition despite the protestations of many senior officials in the U.S. State Department, Secretary of State George Marshall among them. Though historians are divided…

Hey Hey, Ho Ho White Jesus Has to Go… But The Issue is More Complicated Than You Think

By A. E. Brooks-Key

…storical Jesus and what that means theologically, in particular to African Americans. King’s tweet referenced the “Flight into Egypt” (Matthew 2:13) when the holy family were called to flee to Egypt to avoid the “massacre of the innocents” by King Herod. This scriptural reference has served as a prooftext that Jesus and his family were going to hide amongst “Black” people in Africa away from the fury of an infanticidal despot, hence King’s emphasi…

American Missionary Could Face Genocide Charges, But Brazil’s Indigenous Communities Have a Bigger Problem

By Amy Fallas

…n our sacred land, like any person on Earth.” Complicating this dynamic is American missionaries’ own fraught history with indigenous groups, corporate interests, foreign governments, and local officials in the Amazon. Researchers Gerald Colby and Carlotte Dennett demonstrate how the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), and its sister organization the Wycliffe Bible Translators (WBT), spread throughout the Amazon basin during the mid twentieth c…

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

…the more extreme. Among the less extreme consequences was that the rising number of conservative American Christians who identified as Orthodox started to soften opinions and change American rightwing perceptions of Russia. Arguably, what this influx of American evangelicals into American Orthodox churches did was create a bridge over which American evangelicals in Russia were able to cross. An alliance began to take root which shaped Russia and…

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

By Eric C. Miller

…ments with deep suspicion and, in many cases, outright alarm. There were a number of reasons for this. Protestant ministers enjoyed close ties—social, political, financial, and more—to Chicago’s industrial elite, which predisposed them to be skeptical of trade unionism. In the turbulent 1870s and 1880s, as the rank and file, increasingly predominated by the foreign born, repeatedly took its protest to the streets, Protestant leaders called for vio…

A Reforming Tradition Struggles With Change

By Brent Hege

…onal ministers, associates in ministry, and deaconesses, and currently the number of women and men preparing for ministry in ELCA seminaries is roughly equal (Susan Candea, “Wisdom Has Blessed Us”). While there are certainly some in the ELCA who continue to oppose women’s ordination, those numbers are small and grow smaller with each passing year. The same, I suspect, will be the case for the issue of gay and lesbian ordination forty years from no…