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Pennsylvania Rep. Says Contraception Mandate Is Like Pearl Harbor and 9/11

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…rian Stella from accounting shouldn’t be using birth control and by gum he’s not going to pay for a policy that lets her do so without copay. Maybe the evidence that contraception improves women’s health does not enter into his analysis at all. Or maybe he was just charmed by his own rhetoric. I don’t know. I honestly have no idea how to respond to this. It’s one thing for people to oppose the contraception mandate. It’s another thing to… do whate…

The End of Jewish Education As We Know It?

By Benjamin Weiner

…testing. The curriculum was largely secular-cultural, rooted in the Hebraist-Zionists ideology that saw linguistic and territorial nationalism as the new Jewish social glue. A lot has changed already in the past century, mostly as a result of the fact that Jewish assimilation proved a juggernaut. The BJE school network collapsed in the early-60s. Jews were no longer interested in such an articulated system, preferring to rely on the unregulated (…

‘Biblical’ Disaster in Haiti: Pat Robertson and the Curse of Unyielding Ignorance

By Matt Recla

…urches. Haiti, along with Jamaica and Puerto Rico, is home to one of the fastest growing Pentecostal populations in the Caribbean. As I watch the drama unfold in Haiti, and feel it here in Miami, the home of the largest Haitian Diaspora in the United States, I cannot help but think of another earthquake, another country. In 1976 a 7.5 earthquake devastated Guatemala, leaving 23,000 dead and over 50,000 injured. My husband, a child at the time, has…

As a Queer Catholic Woman I Had High Hopes Before the 2023 Catholic Synod on Synodality

By Emma Cieslik

…as I read the summit’s 41-page report. This past Friday I saw New Ways Ministry’s statement, “Synod Report Greatly Disappoints, But We Must Have Hope,” while walking down a busy DC thoroughfare. In it Francis DeBernardo, executive director of the LGBTQ+-affirming Catholic organization, points out how, despite previous documents discussing the welcoming and inclusion of LGBTQ Catholics, there were no positive statements on LGBTQ issues—not even one…

Indonesia Hears Islamist Arguments For LGBT Criminalization; Zambian Churches Oppose Condom Distribution in Prisons; Lithuanian Conservative Manifesto Calls LGBTs Enemies of Freedom; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…We reported last week that Catholic bishops had called for September protests against the president’s proposal to make constitutional changes recognizing marriage equality, which is currently spreading across Mexico through a series of court rulings. Proceso reports this week that the National Front for the Family has announced anti-marriage-equality marches in 60 cities. A spokesman for the group said Mexico needs to protect the “natural family”…

Pope Invites his Flock to Join Facebook: Is the Digital Reformation Here?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ral Essex, arrived while I was mulling over a question Parker Palmer had posted just a bit earlier on his Facebook page about the relationship between violent words and images in broadcast media and violent acts. I’d added my two cents to the developing conversation, citing Douglas Rushkoff’s quip that “They don’t call it ‘programming’ for nothing,” and noting that the unreflective consumption of media is a characteristic of the Broadcast Age that…

Racial Justice Will Be Top Priority for New Prez of the United Church of Christ

By Frederick Clarkson

…rom its birth. In Beyond Resistance, you suggest that some churches should stop struggling and to plan to “die with dignity.” You’ve also said that “the best days of the United Church of Christ are ahead of us.” What do the best days look like in a time of managing what you’ve called “diminishment”? For me, it is important to see the 1957 merger that created the United Church of Christ—not as the establishment of an institutional expression of the…

The Passion of Katniss: How the Hunger Games Confronts the Trauma of Violence

By Michael Schulson

…y Andreasen’s work). In 1952, the first-ever edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders included an entry for gross stress reaction. In the DSM-II, the entry was removed. “The most plausible explanation for the omission is that the concept was closely linked to warfare and combat, and DSM-II was written in a peaceful era,” writes Andreasen. The timing could not have been much worse. America’s involvement in the Vietnam Wa…

For Clergy Who Ministered Through the AIDS Crisis Covid is Both Eerily Familiar and Puzzlingly Different

By Lynne Gerber

…ing,” Jones said, “the difference stigma brings to a pandemic.” It’s the most striking difference between the diseases these clergy have noticed. An early AIDS diagnosis was often intertwined with sexuality, sometimes with substance abuse, and always with social shame. Clergy had to minister to all three in addition to the disease. Jones remembers it as a kind of spiritual triage where he was always trying to figure out the most pressing need to r…

Discovering “Little Syria”—New York’s Long-Lost Arab Neighborhood

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…d floor of the Brooklyn Battery Parking Garage. This very block was the first destination for the waves of immigrants from the Ottoman Empire-occupied lands known as “Greater Syria,” which now encompass Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine/Israel. This first Arabic-speaking community in the U.S. was home to at least 50 Arabic language newspapers and magazines, dozens of Eastern Christian churches, and bustling restaurants, bakeries, silk-traders,…