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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

…n the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Mormon Church: Affirmation holds international conference Affirmation,a group for LGBT Mormons and their supporters, started in the late 1970s as a group of gay Mormons meeting secretly at BYU; it now has affiliates around the world. At last week’s International Affirmation Conference, which brought more than 500 LGBT Mormons and their supporters to Provo Utah, openly gay r…

What’s in a Name? Religious Nones and the American Religious Landscape

By Richard Flory

…volved in any religious institution, whether church, synagogue, temple, or mosque. Finally, and perhaps most telling, people that religion scholars (like myself) designate as Nones rarely think of themselves in that way. This in itself isn’t too insightful, since most scholarly categories are at least once-removed from real life. Yet, in this case, I think it illustrates the point: how people understand the role of religion in their lives is often…

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

By Eric C. Miller

…ense that the alliance between the religious and economic elites was about more than money. They inhabited a shared social world within which it was difficult to imagine labor as anything other than dangerous and threatening. And many workers agreed? Indeed. It would be a mistake to think that all working-class people supported the trade union movement, let alone that all embraced a pro-labor vein of Christian faith. Many did not. I delve into thi…

Rome Has Spoken and Rome Is Finished: The Vatican’s Sexual Abuse Summit ‘Failed Miserably’

By Mary E. Hunt

…iff. Instead, the official meeting featured videos of survivors at yet one more remove from the bishops, many of whom had never listened to survivors in their own dioceses. It’s no wonder. These stories are hard to hear. One woman in a video told of being forced as an underage teen into sex with a priest; he paid for her three abortions. Some bishops expressed genuine shock, leading observers to wonder where they have been for the last two decades…

RD News Round-Up—Oct.14, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…as occurred among all voters who attend religious services once or twice a month, moving from 49% support for Kerry in 2004 to 60% support for Obama in 2008. More Americans think Obama is friendly to religion than McCain. 49% of Americans say Obama is friendly to religion, while 45% say McCain is friendly to religion. More than seven-in-ten (71%) say it is important for public officials to be comfortable talking about religious values. Young first…

How Not To Defend Atheism

By Vlad Chituc

…there are 80 million atheists in the U.S., a full 26% of the country. The most charitable number I could find was from Gallup, putting the number of Americans in 2014 who say they don’t believe in God at 11%. To make things frustratingly worse, other atheists have been calling Silverman out for falsely inflating the number of atheists for more than four years. And last year, I specifically asked Silverman if he would stop reporting the stats on “…

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

By Diane Winston

…repressive policy, those numbers 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 n…

How a Powerful ‘Ex-Gay’ Pastor is Chasing the Latino Vote

By Katherine Stewart

…ering a nation that was once, supposedly, both Christian and white. Furthermore, the movement drives support for a political party that has made race-based gerrymandering and voter suppression a strategic imperative—and for a political candidate who appeals to the racism of many supporters. But the leaders of the movement can read the demographic future just as well as you or I can. Many of them understand very well that the electoral future of th…

To Be Queer, Gifted, and Black: A Conversation with Theologian Pamela Lightsey

By Nyasha Junior

…work. They are part of the leadership. As you know the Black Lives Matter movement is a “leaderful” movement, and that is to say that not one or two persons are in charge of any action but that the movement itself very beautifully recognizes and utilizes the gifts of people in various locations. So it’s leaderful and that’s the way it should be. Despite the leadership of queer black women in the Black Lives Matter movement, when you look at the t…

Belize Overturns Sodomy Law Defended by Religious Right, Ugandan Officials Will Continue to Suppress Gay Groups, And More on the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…nment and the overthrow of Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people faced little threat from the police, who were focused on other matters and largely ignored what happened at house parties or bars in Cairo’s crumbling, bohemian downtown. The crackdown began in earnest when a military curfew imposed after the removal of Mr. Morsi ended in fall 2013, said Scott Long, a human rights…