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Attacks on Tim Walz’s Lutheran Denomination are Undermined by Reality — I Mean, Is ELCA Even Exciting Enough for Controversy?

…Walz’s detractors can help themselves. In a now-deleted post, one Twitter user argued: Walz isn’t actually Lutheran, either: his church does not confess the unaltered Confession of Augsburg to be true, and so they are not actually Lutheran, but just a stack of Methodists in a trenchcoat. That user, like Hemingway, appears to be a member of the Missouri Synod, which like the even more conservative Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) and sm…

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Steve Jobs (1955-2011): Death of a Human Tech God?

…tage industry of scholarship has emerged to track the religiosity of Apple users in particular, much of it focusing on Steve Jobs as the stone once rejected that became the cornerstone, not just of Apple’s tremendous success, but of a new technological culture that placed people, their needs and desires at the center rather than geeks and their way cool, geeky ideas. Jobs made technological devices the extensions of human experience that Marshall…

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The Pope in My Pocket; We Are All Dilettantes Now

…pe in my pocket. Released in late May, the H2Onews iPhone app is the first news application approved by the Vatican. With a touch of my phone I can now get excerpts from the sermons of his Holiness, news from the Vatican, and even the Sunday Gospel. Sporting a sleek interface and a choice of eight languages, the Pontiff has gone 2.0. This might sound like the Vatican is out on the cutting edge, but H2Onews was actually a little slow out of the gat…

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Conservative Evangelical Eric Metaxas, Doing Twitter Theology, Claims ‘Jesus Was White’

…r deeply controversial or profoundly ignorant (or both). In short: Twitter users have pushed back on Metaxas, and they’ve pushed back hard. In response he’s deployed a Trump-ian combination of backpedaling and doubling down on his initial claim. When one user pointed out that Jesus was Jewish, Metaxas responded: “Exactly! Which shows how arbitrary and self-contradictory racial categories can be. Many consider Jews ‘white’ and accuse them of having…

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‘Stand Up For Jesus’: Accessibility in Churches Means More than Ramps

…m into props. Rev. Zoe Heming, a Church of England minister and wheelchair user, recounts the not-uncommon experience of nondisabled people forcing prayers on disabled people: “I’ve been in situations where I’ve been talking to another wheelchair user in church and somebody was so determined to pray for us and we just kept ignoring them because we were in the middle of a conversation. In the end he just put his arms on both our shoulders and just…

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An Open Letter to Black Clergy on the Disdain for Protest

…the streets, not the sanctuary—has set the nation on fire. Courtesy flickr user Bosco d’Anjou via Creative Commons Moreover, it is a movement led and informed by queer black women, many of whom are single mothers. They embodied Jesus—while clergy send them to hell Sunday after Sunday. In kind, the holiest place in St. Louis City is not a church but rather a coffeehouse on the corner of Grand and Arsenal—where a white lesbian and her children feed…

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Muslims Need Not Apply—To the White House or Congress

…ing that Obama should be impeached because he is a Muslim (complete with a promo promising free guns, paid for by “a millionaire” who wants you “protected against what’s coming.”) The video in the email is by evangelist Jack van Impe, known for his premillennial rapture theology and his disconnected rambling in Bible verses. It is entitled “President Obama’s Religion in Question” and argues that he is really a Muslim. Joan, who claims in an email…

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Give Me That Old-Time Ex-Gay Snake Oil

…view LGBT people—as purely sexual beings. Foster’s screed is simply a long promo for a new ex-gay movie coming out, and the trailer, three-minutes of nauseating footage, centers around how each of these former homosexuals lived their lives in clubs, engaging in cheap, easy, and often public sex, or were sexually abused. For all the claptrap the religious right yells about how they don’t want to think of us “that way,” the trailer for the film is p…

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Church=State in Putin’s Orthodox Empire?; Evangelical-Orthodox Anti-Gay Alliance; Malaysian Court Protects Transwomen; Catholicism (Still) Declining in Latin America; Global LGBT Recap

…tes a “vice against nature”? The Portuguese legislators had been too coy to mention gay sex explicitly, and so a meaningless clause entered the statute books, which no court could act upon. This year, the Penal Code was rewritten. The new Penal Code sweeps away a great deal of the musty colonial legacy, including the mention of “vices against nature”. Now not even the most contorted of arguments could claim that acts of gay sex between consenting…

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Why America’s Whitewashed Thanksgiving Needs to Go: A Short Study in the Power of White Christian Mythmaking

…tants. As much as I admire and respect Robinson, I fear that the legacy of New England Protestantism is far more problematic than she suspects. Yes, the New Englanders eventually fought the Southern slave masters but not until after two centuries of profiting from the business of slavery. Yes, the Yankees came to abhor slavery but they also abhorred—and persecuted—the free people of color in their midst. Yes, they spoke out against the annexation…

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