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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

…were described then) founded the Council on Religion and the Homosexual in San Francisco. Well before Stonewall, pastors there took on the police and city officials for their discriminatory behavior toward lesbian, gay, and trans people who simply wanted to have dances or go to bars to meet others. The pastors won. History records that Christian leaders were in the struggle for gay rights from the beginning—a small matter of pride given the enormi…

Is ISIS A Sign of the End Times? It May Only Matter That They Believe So

By Haroon Moghul

…n. The Muslim ummah will be weak and divided, though nearly uncountable in number. In the darkest hour, a Mahdi—a ‘rightly-guided’ descendant of Muhammad—will be identified at Mecca’s Great Mosque. He will rally Muslims against oppression without and within, but his success will provoke a bloodier counter-reaction, led by the ‘False Messiah,’ the anti-Christ. When even the Mahdi will be unable to turn the tide, then Jesus, Islam’s actual Messiah,…

Literary Critic George Steiner, Whose Views on Anti-Semitism Drew Controversy, Dies at 90

By Ed Simon

…d to put an aged Hitler on trial in the Amazon forest after their reconnaissance mission to retrieve him and bring him to Israel for trial has failed. Provocative ideas were Steiner’s medium. In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture, published in 1971, Steiner asked not just of where God was in the nihilism of the Shoah, but of how we’re to possibly understand anything as obscene as “culture” in the aftermath of such m…

Did the Church Create or Co-Opt Human Rights?

By Austin Dacey

…abor Prime Minister Peter Fraser, New Zealand had made common cause with a number of smaller countries and civil society organizations in pressing for recognition of human rights in the Charter. Oddly, Moyn credits the political theorist Charles Beitz with the “remarkable discovery” of Gildersleeve’s contribution, although Gildersleeve described the events in a memoir published in 1954 (the fact even appears in an otherwise meager Wikipedia entry,…

Controversial “Bishop of the Poor” Dies at 86

By Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado

…udying at the Gregorian University in Rome, Bishop Ruiz led the Diocese of San Cristobal de las Casas from 1959 to 2000. In the 1990s he served as mediator in an attempt to end the conflict between the Mexican government and the indigenous Zapatista National Liberation Army in Chiapas. Though he was asked to step down as mediator for supposedly favoring the Zapatistas, the tentative truce between the two groups has been sustained since 1998. He is…

A Life After Death Double-Feature: Eastwood’s Hereafter and Noe’s Enter the Void

By Jay Michaelson

…hereas the characters in Hereafter live in upper-class Paris, middle-class San Francisco, and the most caring and engaged child welfare system the world has ever known. But the differences are more than skin-deep, especially when it comes to religion. Hereafter goes out of its way to demean traditional religion (and esoteric nonsense) en route to its reluctant affirmation of the afterlife—if the film were a person, she’d be “spiritual, not religio…

Sex and Civilization: The Body as Battleground

By Jay Michaelson

…e to Ann Coulter’s desire for well-endowed macho men like George W. Bush; “San Francisco Values” threaten the front lines of the regulation of human desire, and the subservience to authority that conservatism demands. No wonder one Orthodox rabbi recently said that it would be a mitzvah for gay kids to kill themselves. But if liberated sexuality is world-destroying from the mythic, fundamentalist point of view, it is world-creating from a pluralis…

Plant Porn and Physics Prayers

By Meera Subramanian

…ld also be said of academia, not to mention the world of art. One man from San Francisco is taking on all three institutions; targeting priest, scientist, and artist in a playful rally against authority. Jonathon Keats calls himself an experimental philosopher—though novelist, journalist, performance artist, and mad scientist would all fit as well. In his latest work lies an invitation for not just cloistered specialists, but anyone and everyone,…

“Liberal Nazis”: The Republican Crusade Against NPR

By Paul Harvey

…ired rhetoric of liberal bias. But the point here isn’t to bean count partisan representatives on All Things Considered, but to look at the kinds of religious rhetoric behind attacks such as Lamborn’s. The real animus is toward projects of civil conversation in a public realm not dictated by “market forces” and corporate media. An example comes in religion, where public radio is one of the few venues of electronic media where thoughtful and extend…

Catholics Talk About Sex

By Kate Ott

…lues to provide comprehensive sexual health information. The University of San Francisco Health Promotion Services and Loyola University Chicago provide information about contraception and STI prevention. Georgetown University allows H*yas for Choice to provide information and condoms to students in Red Square, a “free speech zone” on campus. These institutions are in the minority. In a survey of Catholic Universities, only 12% of colleges say the…