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Does Religion Condemn Homosexuality?

By Michael Bronski

…ing on a range of issues related to sexual life—such as birth control, “out-of-wedlock” births, abortion, homosexuality, and even sexual assault—the US media overwhelmingly quote the most conservative religious perspectives as the moral position on an issue. This means that conservative Christians, usually evangelical or Catholic, get the most airtime. Is it any wonder, then, that many LGBT people and feminists identify religion as “the enemy”? Bl…

Anti-Gay Violence Rages in Gambia; Conservative ‘Complementarity’ Confab; Coming Out in Iraq Can Be Death Sentence; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…Gambia’s National Intelligence Agency have been reportedly conducting door-to-door enquiries to identify, arrest and detain individuals believed to be homosexual, and some of those detained have allegedly also been subjected to violent attacks and mistreatment, Mr. Zeid said. In other countries, similar laws have also led to an increase in violence against members of the LGBT community, including mob attacks. “I call on The Gambia to fulfil its i…

7 Women Scholars On the Gender Divide in Religious Studies, the Power of Mentors, and Leading While Female

By Rebecca Barrett-Fox

…to them. This changed when I became visibly pregnant. My status as a mother-to-be was a bridge into the congregation, which enabled me to talk to the women there. And I think that this was one of those moments when I had to recognize the ways that gender does make difference. Serene Jones: It’s not like gender is part of who I am and the rest of me is something else. My first book, Calvin and the Rhetoric of Piety, looks at a topic that could appe…

‘My Name is Legion’: Sources and Forces of White Supremacy in the U.S.

By R. Drew Smith

…ents of 19th-century white supremacy, the 20th century witnessed the coming-of-age of an assortment of rank-and-file white supremacists. The emergence of many of these groups paralleled the galvanization of desegregationist and anti-racist forces from the mid-century forward. A group regarded by advocates and critics alike as the ideological backbone of the contemporary white supremacist movement is “Christian Identity,” which asserts “White, Angl…

Religious Leaders Need ‘Empty the Pews’ Which Chronicles the Darker Side of the ‘Nones’ Phenomenon

By Kaya Oakes

…ited world view. These often begin with the person remembering the breaking-point moment, then explain how the individual was brought up in a family with strict religious beliefs, followed by a description of the person’s post-faith life. This is certainly not to say that these stories aren’t important or moving, it’s simply to point out that those looking for patterns in the stories of Nones or post-religious adults might look closely at why such…

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…

The Vatican v. Protestant Free Thinkers

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…row, now seems decidedly tone-deaf, in addition to being intentionally out-of-step with the modern world. On the other side we have the Vatican Library and the Vatican Museums, eminently modern institutions that have drunk deeply from the well of modern ideas. Museums, and the libraries that birthed them, are modern institutions, after all. These places—the Church, versus the Library or Museums—can seem like entirely different worlds, these days….

After More Mass Shootings It’s Time to Call Out White Supremacy in the Pews

By Peter Laarman

…what’s going on, but too few seem capable of saying it. We now have a fair number of political and civic leaders who are willing to say the word trauma and talk about the all-pervasive violence in this culture, not to mention the extent of mental disturbance and the fact that American civilians have more assault rifles in their possession than does the U.S. military. All well and good. But we have too few leaders who will talk about the deeper roo…

Mike Johnson isn’t Just Your Average Christian Right Avatar — He’s Influenced by Fringe Movements Unfamiliar to Most Political Analysts

By Annika Brockschmidt

…partnership ordinances were fraudulent—that they weren’t couples, but “same-sex, live-in lovers” and framed it as an attempt to impose homosexuality on Christians. Two years earlier, Johnson wrote an editorial calling for the criminalization of gay sex. Accordingly, he called the Supreme Court’s landmark 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, which declared the criminalization of gay sex unconstitutional, “a devastating blow to fundamental American val…

The Progress of Christ in Commercial America: A Review of Chris Lehmann’s The Money Cult

By Peter Laarman

…Strong, an early Social Gospel leader who ended up championing the Spanish-American War and the need for “Anglo-Saxons” to Christianize the world. Also the deeply reactionary James W. Fifield, Jr., a pivotal architect of Southern California anti-union conservatism, and Kenneth Hagin, the godfather of the hugely influential Word of Faith movement. A few minor quibbles: at one point Lehmann has late 18th-century “Calvinists” pitted against “Congreg…