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‘No Room’ for Gays in Country that Worships God [Kenya] | Churches Fight to Keep Sexuality Out of Sex Ed [S. Korea] | Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…. Catholic bishops have voted to adjust Church labour law “to the multiple changes in legal practice, legislation and society” so employee lifestyles should not affect their status in the country’s many Catholic schools, hospitals and social services. The change came as the worldwide Catholic Church debates loosening its traditional rejection of remarriage after a divorce and of gay sex, reforms for which German bishops and theologians have become…

Papal Retirement: A Matter of Conscience

By Mary E. Hunt

…egative publicity that the Vatican earned over clergy sexual abuse and episcopal cover-ups without major changes. No hierarchy however fortified can hold out forever against spirit-filled steps toward equality and justice. This time, just electing a new pope will not do. Nor will closeting away a group of elite electors responsible to no one but themselves cut it for an election process. Catholic people have consciences too. We expect to have a sa…

Faith in the Future is No Faith at All: Disney’s Weak Theology

By Scott MacDougall

…s, it won’t be on account of us. We, like them, will simply raise our smartphones and post pics. Doing something to change the world? That’s for the elites. For the chosen. Not for me. Of course, the writers of Tomorrowland certainly mean for us to identify with the heroine. We are supposed to understand ourselves as one of the chosen, with a contribution of our own to make. However, the trope of the Chosen One in such stories always entails the f…

What ‘Faith Groups Do X’ Journalism Reveals About the Press’s Priorities

By Chrissy Stroop

…millennials for “killing” industries that are succumbing to macroeconomic changes driven by greed at the top. Did you know, for example, that “Faith Groups Increasingly Join the Fight Against Climate Change”? At least that’s the claim made in an article published earlier this month that provides no data to support the notion that faith groups are more involved in fighting climate change now than they’ve been in the past. Toward the end, this arti…

Will International Criminal Court Bring Charges Against ISIS For Gender-Based Persecution?; And More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…e] is a society which is not that liberal on these matters. Attitudes have changed, but I believe if you have a referendum on the issue today, 377A would stand,” Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong told the BBC in an interview in February. “My personal view is that if I do not have a problem, this is an uneasy compromise, I am prepared to live with it until social attitudes change.” Media policies, meanwhile, continue to block any positive portrayals o…

Protesting the Pope’s (Not Yet Released) Environmental Encyclical? Check Your Doctrine

By Kevin M. Lowe

…Catholic bishops stated in no uncertain terms that on the issue of climate change, they “accept the consensus findings of so many scientists and the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).” That level of consensus, they stated, required taking action. But that action needed to be complex and ecological in nature; in a 1991 pastoral statement called “Renewing the Earth,” the bishops had already written that “the web of…

Conservative Cardinals’ Controversial Letter Cites Church Appeal

By Patricia Miller

…t instead of attracting a younger, more open-minded demographic with these changes, the Episcopal Church’s dying has proceeded apace.” It’s true that the Episcopal Church did go in a progressive direction, from being the first Christian church to approve the use of birth control in 1930, to consecrating women priests, to electing the first openly-gay bishop. And it’s also true that the church has seen a rapid decline in the US, but there’s no proo…

Don’t Tread on our Gas Stoves: The Latest Right-Wing Cause May Be Silly But the Strategy is the Point

By Annika Brockschmidt

…t of what this latest outrage is meant to facilitate: to turn any cultural change, however small, into a story of victimization. This is the powerful driving force behind the Right’s grievances, and it provides them with permission to “hit back” as a form of “defense.” By framing change or progress as an existential threat, the Right creates a siege mentality which is essential to the victimization narrative—no easy thing to do if your movement is…

Why I’m Grateful for 2012, The Rapture, and other Millennial Delusions

By Jay Michaelson

…sh-fulfillment, at once eros and thanatos, that, failing to understand how change actually takes place, instead yearns for the whole system to be destroyed by magical means. It is a pathetic, if consummately human, fantasy. Yet given the violence of most millennialist prophecies, we should be grateful for their impotence. Editor’s note: this article was changed on 12/20 to correct an editorial error regarding post- and pre-millenialism. We blame t…

LGBT’s, Opponents Prep for Vatican Synod; UN Rights Council Adopts LGBT Resolution; Brazil’s Evangelicals Eye Presidency; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…nationalists, but was backed by left-wing groups. Russia: Gov’t Cancels Exchange Program as Gay Teen Opts to Stay in U.S. The Russian government is up in arms about a teenager who declined to return home after participating in an exchange program. The student is reportedly saying with a gay couple that has other foster children. BuzzFeed’s Lester Feder reports that a Russian official has charged that the 17-year-old boy was illegally put up for a…