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Morality and Marriage Vigilantes and More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…early unanimous. The legislation also increases the legal marriage age from 16 to 18. The ban on homosexuality was initially proposed in 2014, but as a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. The new regulation, however, categorizes homosexuality as a misdemeanor; violators, male or female, would face a fine or suspended prison sentence. Unless Déby vetoes the change, which is unlikely, Chad will become the 73rd country to criminalize homos…

Bonnaroo Dispatches: Stages

By E. David Morgen

…t while the number of young Americans who consider themselves religious or spiritual remains roughly constant, their spiritual practices are changing. They are more likely than their parents to consider themselves unaffiliated with any particular practice, or the version of the religion they practice boils down to injunctions to a vague sense of morality, fairness, and happiness, what Christian Smith calls “moral therapeutic deism.” Smith bases hi…

Bonnaroo 3: With a Buzz in Our Ears

By E. David Morgen

…roup of Birmingham college students who had been persuaded by one of their number that this was worth the wait. It was. It is hard to describe the experience of standing in the second row of a rock concert, untold numbers at your back, without sounding trite. In a world in which it is possible to conduct nearly all communication via one machine or another, to travel from one climate-controlled setting to the next without exchanging so much as a mo…

The Harlot Shall Be Burned with Fire: Biblical Literalism in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

By Sarah Sentilles

…confusing. Which is troubling for a film being shown in a country in which 1 in 5 women will be raped in her lifetime, in which 84,767 rapes were reported nationwide in 2010. The violent images weren’t necessary. The rapes could have happened behind closed doors; or with Lisbeth’s clothes on; or the camera could have been kept on her face rather than on her lifted backside. To communicate the terror of the rape scenes all you need is a good actor…

The War Within: Religion and Our Tangled Relationship with Our Bodies

By Michelle Lelwica

…vement. I also think there are common misconceptions about both health and spirituality that prevent us from seeing the relationship between the two. In the U.S. today, religion and medicine are often seen as separate spheres—mirroring Descartes’ erroneous understanding of the “mind” as independent from the “body.” I like to point out that the etymology of the term “salvation”—which comes from the Latin, salve, which means “good health” and is som…

The Messiah is Not Coming

By Peter Laarman

…ation, apart from the first. That one is plain for all to see in the scary numbers given out by the Census Bureau earlier this month: big jumps in the number of Americans losing compensated work for working poverty or worse, and concomitant big jumps in the number of people losing health care coverage. The thing is—and labor market specialists all concur—these blows are no longer cyclical phenomena that will be reversed once “the economy” really s…

Magic in the Air: How Intellectuals Invented the Myth of a Mythless Society

By Jason Josephson Storm

…on that gave birth to the academic disciplines. I’ve also uncovered that a number of famously “modern” intellectuals held unusual religious/spiritual beliefs that that their later followers and even critics tend to be unaware of—and might be pissed to discover/have exposed. Still, I’d rather be controversial than uphold a misguided status quo! What alternative title would you give the book? I had always meant for the title to be “The Myth of Disen…

The Fourth of July Is Not America’s Birthday

By Peter Laarman

…rmer colonies. Those who prefer a winter birthday might want to go for Dec. 15, 1791, the date on which the required three-fourths of the states had ratified the Bill of Rights. (I know: much too close to Christmas, doesn’t have a chance.) This “birthday” business matters because people who are utterly ignorant of their own history need to be slapped around a little. As well, people who seem to think that the British Empire’s response to the 1776…

LGBT Christians Respond to Southern Baptists’ Call For Kindness, Understanding

By Mike Greer

…Moore and other conference leaders appeared to be caught off guard by the number of LGBT Christians and supportive Christian advocates, some Baptists, who not only attended the entire conference, but also respectfully and publicly responded to Moore’s call to kindness and understanding and offered to meet with conference leaders at the venue. Although there were evidently no face-to-face meetings with Moore, about a dozen LGBT Christians and LGBT…

Global Religious Right Asks ‘How Far Can We Get?’; And More in the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…egnancy did not put the woman’s life at risk. A woman could receive five to 10 years in prison, while a doctor could be sentenced to six to 12 years—up to 25 years if a woman dies as a result of an abortion. The bill also includes a restriction on public and private educational institutions from promoting “gender ideology” and a provision that “no person may be prosecuted” for not accepting “sexual diversity.” Deputy Anibal Rojas Espino, who intro…