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Rolling the Stone Away: LGBTQI Elders Meet the Next Generation of Christian Activists at a Watershed Conference

By Mary E. Hunt

…minist writer Virginia Ramey Mollenkott were there in spirit but unable to travel. The meeting took place none too soon as human beings with these people’s track records have reason to be fragile in their later years. Social change work is exhausting, often thankless work. The St. Louis convening was a time to express profound gratitude. It was also a chance to bask in the goodness of hard work well done by countless colleagues whose shoulders are…

YouTube Terrorism

By Bruce B. Lawrence

…topics so hateful or obscene that they’re debarred from the Internet. They travel virally in a world that welcomes them but cannot monitor either their content or their impact. What al-Qaeda did today, other ill-wishers or polemicists or terrorists can, and will likely, do tomorrow. This is the greatest, and sobering, lesson of the death and destruction that came out of the 9/11/12 debacle. Alas, it is a part of our brave new world of endless info…

RDPulpit: You Lost the Debate

By Mary E. Hunt

…tizens adjudicate their differences. At a time in world history when space travel is practically economy or business class, and the Internet allows instant communication, there is something rather quaint, not to mention morally reprehensible, about sending troops anywhere. Don’t people see how ridiculous it is to blow up one another’s children? We need a good open forum on the nature of patriotism, how everyone can give to and receive from their c…

Blue Jean Revolution

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ne that. You could stroll breezily into Albania wearing an Armani suit and travel free and unmolested, but a young traveler in blue jeans—one working for the revolution no less—gets stopped and held over. Such is the impossible and untamable shift in meaning of so many of the things humans create. The Maccabean revolution broke out in Hellenistic Judea when the young kids started wearing a Greek-style hat, and going to the gymnasium. God knows wha…

Catholics Across the Globe Reject Vatican’s LGBTQ Cruelty — Others Blame the Sock

By Mary E. Hunt

…decision that is “gratuitously cruel in the extreme.” Theologians in large numbers have expressed their disdain. Protestant pastors have stepped forth and welcomed same-sex couples to their churches, offering blessings. I bet many would offer legal marriage as well, hardly poaching adherents from a tradition that seems happy to see us go. One million German-speaking Catholic women from five organizations signaled their view that same-sex couples b…

Is New Pope’s Take on the Poor All That New?

By Silvia Alves Fernandes and Manuel A. Vásquez

…frugality and simplicity seems to have its limits. As Francis prepares to travel to Brazil to attend the 2013 World Youth Day, reports have surfaced that the Vatican has asked the country and the city of Rio de Janeiro to pitch in an additional $39 million to cover a shortfall in funding for the visit. Brazil and Rio had already forked over close to $65 million, most of it to cover the cost of security, counting on two million expected pilgrims t…

The Muslim Ban May Be Unconstitutional, But It’s Not Un-American

By Willie Dwayne Francois

…t it isn’t quite correct to say that it’s “un-American.” Masquerading as a travel ban, last Friday’s executive order dramatizes the perpetual conflict between the essential America and the existential America. Essential America places a premium on justice, peace and freedom, while the existential America practices a politics of exclusion, a heritage of hate and a culture of violence. The tragic conflation of global terrorism and Islam undermines t…

Unified Catholic Opposition to Trump’s “Muslim Ban” is Wishful Thinking

By Patricia Miller

…people grasping for a light in the darkness in the wake of Trump’s Muslim travel ban, they would look to the leadership of the Catholic Church. After all, the institutional Catholic Church has consistently been a voice for immigrant rights and Pope Francis has made compassion for migrants and refugees a special concern of his papacy. So we get articles like this one in the Washington Post, asserting that Trump is “facing fierce opposition” from C…

By the Way: James Dobson Departs the Scene

By Randall Balmer

…ironment, the prosecution of an unjust war, human rights and torture. As I travel to evangelical colleges, I find that the issue of sexual identity (for example) is, well, not much of an issue among a younger generation of evangelicals. Sure, if you pressed them, many would say that homosexuality is wrong, but they simply can’t understand why Dobson and the other leaders of the religious right are so exercised over the matter. So too with abortion…

Comparing Gender Transition and Surrogacy to War and Human Trafficking, Vatican’s ‘Dignitas Infinita’ is an Intellectually Embarrassing and Harmful Mess

By Mary E. Hunt

…s moral reflection is needed. This is not it. The rest of the document, 66 numbered paragraphs, includes an introduction to the notion of human dignity which for the Vatican boils down to Natural Law, and a history of the concept of human rights as it has emerged in Catholicism and some global platforms. The second half is a catalog of what are considered by the writers to be “grave violations” of human dignity: poverty, war, injustice to migrants…