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Scottish Episcopal Church Angers Conservative Anglicans With Embrace of Same-Sex Marriage; and more in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…marriage is not technically illegal, there is no institution authorized to carry it out. In a system inherited from Ottoman times, people can only marry in Israel through their religious institutions: Jewish couples must marry through the Chief Rabbinate, which refuses to carry out same sex marriages, and Christians, Druze and Muslims all marry through their own state-sanctioned and publicly funded religious legal systems. Guam: Officials looking…

The Internet Is Not Killing Religion, Religion is Killing Religion

By Elizabeth Drescher

…data on the correlation between the number of pipers in a village and the number of butts in local church pews. Across the pond in the American colonies, religion was not faring much better. In his masterful reconstruction of American religious history, Awash in a Sea of Faith (from which the previous anecdote is drawn), Jon Butler reports that Christianity was “in crisis” in the New World: Pennsylvania aside, the Restoration colonies of New York…

Was Ghana Anti-Gay Scare Just Politics?

By Warren Throckmorton

…ed “to get rid of these people in the society.” Some observers believe the number of sexual minorities may have been inflated in order to whip up opposition to homosexuality which could advance the standing of conservative politicians. Graham Knight, a British blogger living in Ghana, recently wrote that the claim of 8,000 sexual minorities has little support in fact. Knight concluded, in a blog post titled Did Ghana register 8000 homosexuals? The…

A Question for Hobby Lobby Supporters…

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…aception. So is the salient difference the size of the list? Is there some number of things-this-paper-can-be-used-for that puts the employer at a safe moral distance from the act, where previously they had been complicit? If so, what’s the number? How long does the list of possible uses have to be to assuage the employer’s conscience enough to let the employees use their compensation for things the employer finds morally repugnant? See, here’s th…

Fasting and Faithy Friends of Convenience

By Sarah Posner

…lessed among us, pulling the lever for McCain-Palin probably wasn’t in the cards. To add insult to injury to the “religion industrial complex,” as Digby calls it, the services of the small number of political strategists who peddled the Democrats-need-to-talk-more-about-religion theory are apparently no longer wanted by the Democratic Party. Never mind whether Democrats finally got good at “talking about their religion,” as if that were the only m…

Episcopal Conference Lives Up to Episcopal Jokes

By Julie Ingersoll

…the height of the battling, that it was all not such a big deal, that the number of dissidents was actually quite small and that he thought his church would be better off once they were gone. Indeed, according to Wikipedia there are over 7,000 Episcopal congregations in the US with over 2 million members, though the significance of that number is unclear since, as the priest in the church where I was baptized once teased me: “when you’re baptiz…

YOU Are Spiritual But Not Religious: The Secret Spiritual History of the Choose Your Own Adventure Books

By Daniel Silliman

…hought of as embracing a mishmash of conflicting ideas—Catholicism and reincarnation, Buddhism and crystals, kitschy angels and dreamcatchers—which, if taken seriously as ideas, would not seem to fit together. For Montgomery, however, joining spiritual individuality to social practice meant a special emphasis on individual decisions, individual choices. He didn’t necessarily advocate that people believe a bit of everything, but rather that they ta…

Can The Religious Left Be Effective Again? Longer Answer: Quizás

By Daniel Schultz

…gh participation rates are increasing among these types of churches, they represent a small percentage of all churches. Fulton explains that a lot of this increase is due to the debates over immigration reform; but even factoring that in, Hispanic churches are becoming more politically active. The number of congregations might be few, but they may also be larger communities, representing a substantial number of people. In any case, the trend will…

Hajj Journal: Using the Toilet at the Grand Mosque

By Amina Wadud

…sque is gigantic, full of beautiful and elaborate designs, with an immense number of repetitions to them. The stairs and the escalators are deceiving, taking two for each floor in one tower and only one escalator per floor in another tower. I never did figure out which was which. I knew the fastest way up to the third floor from my hotel, but this was always early and therefore less chaotic. It also involved a wide ramp straight from the outer fro…

Are You Rapture Ready?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…cted on a van parked in a shopping center parking lot near Columbia, South Carolina months ago, so I suppose I’m already behind in my preparations. I count myself among the scoffers of second coming date-setting since Jesus himself said we won’t know the date or the time of his return. Evans is prepared with his answer to me and others who laugh off their efforts: “Sadly, only eight people survived the flood in Noah’s time,” he said. “The number o…