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

By Katherine Stewart

…ic and Pentecostal vein, and these are explicitly multiracial movements. A number of the more farsighted leaders are therefore making a conscious effort to include and empower nonwhite individuals and groups. At the very least, they are doing what they can to collect their votes. Jim Domen is one such leader. A California pastor and the founder of a group called Church United, he has built his voter-outreach machine around the idea of racial inclu…

What Fidel Castro’s Death Means for LGBT Rights in Cuba and More, in This Week’s Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ch still criminalize same-sex relations, even when the colonizing power discarded such laws a long time ago,” he said. “On another front, while care, kindness and consideration are at the heart of religions in their common humanity and linkage with human rights, various interlocutors misconstrue or resort to interpretations to justify violence and discrimination.” U.S.-based religious conservatives have been working closely with anti-gay country d…

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

…ef Justice Kenneth Benjamin ruled on August 10 that the law criminalizing “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” violates constitutional protections for human dignity, privacy, and equality before the law. The case had been brought by Caleb Orozco, director of United Belize Advocacy Movement (UNIBAM) more than six years ago. The Chief Justice ruled that the definition of “sex” in the country’s constitution, includes sexual orientation. B…

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

By Eric C. Miller

…l success of the social justice faith. When RD’s Eric C. Miller spoke with Carter about his project, he had in mind a number of parallels between the late 1800s and the early 2000s. Then as now, inequality was on the rise as the rich became richer and the poor struggled to improve their lives. Then also as now, church attendance rates began to decline as congregants grew disaffected with Church leadership. In both cases, progressive Christians hav…

Forget Right or Wrong

By Elizabeth Drescher

…Burning Man, to wholly idiosyncratic practices such as completing paint-by-number paintings of The Last Supper. Feeding the Poor, Housing the Homeless A 7-year study with nearly 15,000 undergraduates at 136 colleges and universities across the country by Alexander and Helena Astin of UCLA’s Center for Spirituality in Higher Education provides some clues to the shaping of contemporary American religious practice. The Astins’ work has shown that at…

Can Mormon Glenn Beck Unite the Christian Right?

By Kathryn Joyce

…Family Manifesto,” a guiding document of the WCF community, co-written by Carlson and Paul Mero, head of the Mormon think tank the Sutherland Institute. The ecumenical call to arms extols a conservative lifestyle where fathers lead and women honor their highest domestic calling by becoming “prolific mothers” of “full quivers of children.” In service of that goal, Carlson, who has helped craft policy for ultra-right Senator Sam Brownback and Repre…

A Reforming Tradition Struggles With Change

By Brent Hege

…onal ministers, associates in ministry, and deaconesses, and currently the number of women and men preparing for ministry in ELCA seminaries is roughly equal (Susan Candea, “Wisdom Has Blessed Us”). While there are certainly some in the ELCA who continue to oppose women’s ordination, those numbers are small and grow smaller with each passing year. The same, I suspect, will be the case for the issue of gay and lesbian ordination forty years from no…

Why We Must Reclaim “Religious Freedom” from Christian Conservatives

By Bill Berkowitz

…ft stores that the Obama administration’s implementation of the Affordable Care Act included four kinds of contraceptives that they considered to be abortifacients, and that therefore the inclusion of these drugs in their company health plan violated their religious freedom under the 1992 federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). Even though the drugs are not considered to be abortifacients by the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecol…

For Buddhism, Science is Not a Killer of Religion

By Paul Wallace

…use the taxi ride was making me ill) I found the seals to be palpably and scarily true. And, per the Buddhadharma, I didn’t believe them just because I was taught them (which I had been), or because I read them in a book written by a lama (which I was doing). I believed them because I had found them to be true in my own experience. Which is strange, because I’m not a Buddhist. Not only that, but I’m not into blending things. I’m kind of a purist….

The Episcopal Church ‘Takes a Flying Leap’ into Controversies Old and New

By Elizabeth Drescher

…evidence of anyone “storming out” is to be found in reports from the South Carolina bishop and deputies themselves or those who attended to their concerns, even when they disagreed, as the group announced its decision to leave.) On Sunday, July 15, Lawrence issued a pastoral letter to members of the Diocese of South Carolina in which he explained that the approved blessings would not be made available in the diocese—an option for any bishop made p…