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Pride Month & Prejudice; ‘Worrisome Time’ For LGBT People; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ionalists A crowd estimated by organizers at 50,000 people and by police at 13,000 marched in Warsaw’s 17th annual Equality Parade on June 3, which DW notes come at a time when the conservative government is opposing civil unions for same-sex couples: Poland’s constitution is one of seven in the EU to ban gay marriage and the country is one of six in the 28-member bloc not to allow same-sex civil unions. The ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party in P…

The Wrong Emperor: Why Ralph Reed’s New Pro-Trump Book Distorts the Bible to Cast the President as Tiberius

By Tony Keddie

…was not the emperor to whom Paul appealed. Nero was! Tiberius reigned from 14–37 CE. Acts of the Apostles only refers to the emperor to whom Paul appealed after his arrest in Jerusalem by the generic title “Caesar,” but the other historical figures mentioned as part of Paul’s trials (especially Porcius Festus, who governed Judea beginning around 59 CE) leave no doubt that the emperor in question is none other than Nero (r. 54–68 CE). Later ancien…

Good News: Religious Outreach Works On Vaccine Hesitancy. Bad News: We Need It.

By Daniel Schultz

…h is at least somewhat reassuring. Still, according to PRRI, more than 4 in 10 Americans are hesitant or opposed to getting vaccinated. That number could and should be much lower, but we seem to have lost our collective way. Over 500,000 dead, and America can’t even agree on the simplest proposition: getting your shot is good for you, and good for the people around you. Full disclosure: I currently work for as a contractor for the Wisconsin Counci…

The Conservative Bible Project: Looking for Conservative Diamonds in a Liberal Dung-Hill

By Thomas Fabisiak

…ody sweat” of Luke 22:43-44, the number six hundred sixty-six in Revelation 13, and 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 (which enjoins women to be silent in church). One of the main reasons for differences between newer translations of the Bible and the KJV is that the latter does not consistently reflect what scholars now believe to be the earliest and best ancient manuscripts. Conservative Christian groups usually oppose text-critical analysis of the manuscr…

Despite Conflation of Israel with Judaism, Anti-Zionism is More Kosher Than You Think

By Seth Sanders

…ated as non-Jews and antisemites, may ironically find themselves rejoining the historical mainstream of Jewish religious tradition documented by Ravitzky. ¹ Song of Songs Rabbah 2:7, Babylonian Talmud Ketubbot 111a with Rashi’s specifications. ² The first Reform platform calling for “the rehabilitation of Palestine” passed by a single vote in 1937. ³ On Redemption and its [Illegitimate] Substitutes…

Francis Must Make Changes to Have a Real Effect

By Patricia Miller

…s remained fairly steady in recent decades is “the disproportionately high number of Catholics among immigrants to the U.S.,” which has masked “the large number of people who have left the Catholic church.” According to Pew, approximately one-third of those raised Catholic have left the church and 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics. If you were a business losing one-third of your customers, wouldn’t you want to make some changes? Sur…

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

By Eric Vanden Eykel

…te this, Metaxas’s tweet has been severely “ratioed,” which means that the number of responses far exceeds the number of “likes” and retweets. This is generally an indication that a tweet’s contents are either 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 clai…

Gen Z’s Religious Affiliation Stats Are Confusing … But Only When Viewed From a Christian-Centric Perspective

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…ay they “believe in God without a doubt,” broken down by generation: Gen Z numbers drop off precipitously since the late nineties. The second showed the number who say they “believe in some higher power.” Here, Gen Z showed an equally precipitous rise, since around 2012. Thompson’s tweet betrays some exasperation with the apparently contradictory results: “Depending on how you ask the question,” he wrote, Gen Z was either “leading a stunning athei…

How Fitbit Helps a Conservative Evangelical College Monitor Students’ Bodies For Christ

By Jonathan Root

…t the “Aerobics Center,” students filled out a computer card with their ID number, activity number, and the time, intensity, and distance of their workout. The data derived from the cards helped to determine grades. One student who had been forced to enroll in the Pounds Off Program said, “I’m really sad for the school. It has so much potential, so many positive things about it, but you can’t treat people this way… They treat you like you’re not c…

Single, But Married To Jesus

By Anthea Butler

…other men, whether desirable as a husband or not, stood in the way of the number one relationship. One person I interviewed even had a name for it: “being loosed” from your husband to do the Lord’s work. “Being loosed” could happen because the husband left because the wife was at church too much, they divorced, or the husband died. Others were in horrible marriages, often with physical and emotional abuse involved. Some never married. Yet the chu…