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New Mormon Anti-Gay Policy Sparks Mass Exodus From Church; Christian AID Workers in Africa Refuse to Help Gay Refugees; Ukraine Rejects, Then Accepts EU-Required Gay Rights Law; Global LGBT Recap

…rts struck it down, the environment has proved too dangerous for a growing number of Ugandans. But in Kenya they face constant attacks, kidnappings, extortion and police harassment. Recently, almost a dozen LGBT people were taken by the United Nation’s refugee agency (UNHCR) to a safe house in Nairobi, after they were attacked on a night out. Even that agency – the very group tasked with protected LGBT people – has admitted its own staff are hosti…

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Dispatches From the Rhodian Shore: A (Tough) Love Letter to Religious Studies

…nature in economics. Most of the rest of my argument builds on data point number 5, focusing on how religious studies (as if that’s a monolithic thing) to date has talked about the natural world. I share the below as someone who is at the core of my training a religionist who’s vested in using education to build a better, more sustainable society. I recognize that understanding the role of religion in society is of import as we work toward this g…

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Growing Up Cult: A Memoir of Life with Sri Chinmoy

…xperiments), she began to question the idea of devotion to a guru. After a number of attempts to leave, she broke free of the group at age twenty-five. I recently caught up with Tamm to talk about Sri Chinmoy’s death, her use of the word “cult,” and what her spiritual life looks like today. ** Did it make a difference to his followers that Sri Chinmoy was from India? Did it give him extra authority? In the late 1960s, there was a trend to look to…

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With Election Takeaways Like ‘Too Transgender’ or ‘the US is Shifting Right,’ Dems are Determined to Learn the Wrong Lesson

…king class (or the electorate as a whole) has “moved to the right.” Yes, a number of 2020 Biden supporters do appear to have voted for Trump in 2024—that is not in question. The problem with a phrase like ‘a movement to the Right’ is that it will most likely be understood as a meaningful shift in the electorate’s values—a shift we can expect to see moving forward—rather than as a snapshot of a single election cycle. If the Democratic Party in part…

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My Womb for His Purposes: The Perils of Unassisted Childbirth in the Quiverfull Movement

…the babies” themselves, both saving money and demonstrating their faith. A number of Quiverfull families follow a similar arc (as had Garrison) graduating from conventional hospital births—often where mothers felt pushed into a birth plan they didn’t desire—to midwife-assisted births at home, to the final challenge of unattended home births. It’s a logical extreme of the movement whose naturalistic bent actually overlaps with the back-to-the-land,…

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The Dirty Little Secret of Every Ponzi Scheme, or: Bernie Madoff’s 150 Year Sentence

…ff and Law stories has something to do with the confusion created by large numbers. The point is, in the financial sector, numbers need to correspond to some reality. Law’s paper notes were supposed to correspond to the gold held in his bank’s reserves. When the gap between numbers and real things grew too great, his system collapsed. It became, almost unwittingly, a nationwide French Ponzi scheme. Law was encouraged by the French regent to covert…

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The 50 Shades of Evangelicalism

…evolution is incompatible with the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” a significant number of evangelicals are working to convince their fellow believers of their compatibility. Their efforts are evident in the increasing number of books, conferences, and organizations—such as Francis Collins’ BioLogos—that have formed around the topic. Cracks are likewise showing in what once was understood as a unanimous and uncritical evangelical support of Israel as ep…

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Competing Visions of Family & Freedom at UN; Methodists Try to Avoid Schism on Sexuality; Catholic Cardinal Denounces LGBT ‘Demonic Ideology’; Global LGBT Recap

…ment. There is a widespread feeling that, despite impressive growth in the numbers and capacities of organizations promoting queer/LGBTIA+ issues, there has been little impact on the everyday lives of African queer/LGBTIA+ individuals and communities. Discriminatory laws and policies remain stubbornly in place in almost all countries, and the hostile public perceptions of queer/LGBTIA+ identities that sustain these laws and policies seem as pervas…

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The Resurgence of Right-Wing Anti-Semitic Conspiracism Endangers All Justice Movements

…t the white nationalist ideology that inspired him is also implicated in a number of other recent attacks, including the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in October, the killing of 49 Muslim worshippers last month in New Zealand, and the 2015 murder of nine African-American Christian worshippers in Charleston, South Carolina. In Earnest’s twisted worldview, “every Jew is responsible for the meticulously planned genocide of the European race,” and he…

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In the Papal Pocket: Benedict XVI and the Press

…sure softball questions, few dissident voices, and reverent talk about the number of ciboria necessary to serve communion in baseball stadiums. And, we are all supposed to know what ciboria are (for the record, they are the goblet-shaped metal vessels that hold the hosts—that is, the wafers—used for communion). Catholic terminology is about the only thing used liberally in these exercises. Television hosts like Tim Russert fairly swoon over their…

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