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What Did the Puritans Have Against Christmas?

By Bruce David Forbes

…the return and advance of Christmas goes to major cultural influences like Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and the morphing of St. Nicholas into Santa Claus. Dickens’ famous story did not reflect the Christmas of his time but instead was an attempt to resurrect and reinvent Christmas, and it was incredibly successful. A Christmas Carol contains very little direct reference to religion and says nothing about a baby in a manger—but it does promot…

A Third Reconstruction? Rev. William Barber Lifts the Trumpet

By Peter Laarman

…hen today we ought to be able to use the Internet, Twitter, Facebook, cell phones and our growing network of churches to educate the new Southern Electorate—black, white, Latino, Asian, gay, straight, labor, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, agnostics, atheists, atudents and their elders, environmentalists—all who want a better life for all God’s people. The South matters because it is the native home of America’s original sin. Yes, we m…

#VanillaISIS, White Tears and the Adventures of Captain Moroni

By Megan Goodwin

…plex relationship to race may lend nuance to our own understandings of the standoff. I am indebted to Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Benjamin Knoll, and John-Charles Duffy for their insights and contributions to this article….

What Did Pope Benedict Know and When Did He Know It?

By Patricia Miller

…stance, in 1986, Ratzinger stripped renowned progressive theologian Father Charles Curran of his right to teach at Catholic universities because he held it was possible to dissent from non-infallible church teachings, especially those on abortion, contraception and homosexuality. That same year, Ratzinger stripped Seattle Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of much of his authority after he allowed gay Catholics to celebrate mass at St. James Cathedral…

Mormon Leader Affirms Doctrine on Marriage; and More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…Rainbow Index ranked it the worst place in Europe to be gay, based on the number of violent homophobic attacks and discriminatory remarks by public figures. The CBC says the president of an Azerbaijani LGBT rights group, who now lives in Germany, “told CBC nes gay people in the oil-rich, mainly Muslim country have been subjected to occasional harassment in the past, but a systematic effort to detain people in unprecedented.” Lawyer Samed Rahimli…

‘Politicized Religion’ Doesn’t Explain Evangelical Support of Donald Trump

By Daniel Miller

…h.” As a legion of contemporary scholars (e.g., Talal Asad, José Casanova, Charles Taylor, Saba Mahmood, and Elizabeth Shakman Hurd) have argued, the delimitation of the social spheres of religion and politics, and the boundary between them, is socially-constituted, variable, and constantly contested. This does not mean that “there is no such thing” as religion or politics, or that one term can simply be collapsed into the other; it means that wha…

Tribal Trouble: The Changing Nature of American Jews’ Relationship to Israel and the Question of Jewish Unity

By Shaul Magid

…hstone of this disunity which is, in some ways, quite new. Decades earlier Charles Liebman made the claim that, “Israel has become instrumental to one’s American Jewish identity. Israel, and concern for Israel, are preeminently a symbol of Jewish identity.” Arthur Hertzberg, author of the seminal book, The Zionist Idea, went as far as calling supporting Israel a “substitute religion” for American Jews. This was not only true of people on the cente…

Catholic Bishops Meeting For Family Synod; South Africa’s Dutch Reformed Church OKs Gay Weddings, Ordination; Court in Malaysia Deals Setback To Transgender Advocates; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ng media, challenging the laws through legal cases. Nancy Nicol writes: “A number of themes can be identified throughout this body of work that speak to profound discrimination and violence: random violence in public places; police harassment, extortion, custodial rape; ‘corrective rape’ against lesbians ‘to make them straight’; exclusion and violence perpetuated by friends, family and community; Church fueled hate; state fueled hate; employment d…

After Roe: 3 Troubling Trends from the ‘Compassionate’ Anti-Abortion Crowd

By Robert Repino

…ple who passed them didn’t really mean what they were doing. (They did.) A number of others have expressed a similar view, like the panelists in a recent discussion hosted by Georgetown University who lamented the moral “compromises” that anti-abortion activists have made. Others, like Religion News Service columnist Charles C. Camosy, have—either naively or disingenuously—called on the movement to move past Trump, as though the movement could eas…

Opting for Lucy Over Linus: Watching The Great Pumpkin in the Age of Trump

By Jonathan Malesic

…In an era of heightened political suspicion, argument, and even violence, Charles M. Schulz’s allegory has became about truth, falsehood, and stubborn belief in fake stories. It asks not just about faith and doubt, but also about how we can manage to live with people we think are dangerously wrong about important matters. For political liberals like me, it’s about the challenge of loving the blockheads all around us. In previous years, I sympathi…