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The Wrong Emperor: Why Ralph Reed’s New Pro-Trump Book Distorts the Bible to Cast the President as Tiberius

By Tony Keddie

…around the same time that Reed’s book came out. After Trump retweeted a curious meme of himself playing the violin back in March, a number of critics mocked him for acknowledging that he is like Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burns—a fiery critique of him golfing while numerous Americans, especially poor and racially marginalized Americans—died from COVID-19. Reed couldn’t associate Trump with a notorious persecutor of Christians, so he opted…

Pope Francis Has Painted Himself into a Corner on Women Deacons

By Mary E. Hunt

…he transitional and to the permanent diaconate, or whether women will be siphoned off into a spurious order of deaconesses who have a title but no authority. Think of it as parallel ladders, one of which, ordination to the diaconate, is a direct route to the presbyterate, episcopacy, and, de facto, the papacy. The other, naming women as deaconesses but giving them no authority or jurisdiction, is the ladder that goes nowhere. My expectation—and I…

Reactionary White Buddhists Have Joined The Fight Against Critical Race Theory

By Ann Gleig

…red with anti-critical race theory laws being passed for K-12 schools in a number of Republican states and further bills aimed at higher education proposed. What many will perhaps find more surprising is that the rhetoric being used by Campus Reform and their ilk is far from new to me or fellow researchers working on racial justice in American Buddhism. Rather it echoes some of the white Buddhist backlash to racial justice work. A number of white…

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

By Jason Josephson Storm

…th me about various protective talismans and ghostly premonitions. After a number of the patrons had shared such anecdotes, one Japanese man asked me, curiously, if these sorts of things didn’t go on in America. Before I could answer (and describe America’s own enchantment), a European patron jumped in, assuring everyone that Japan was much more spiritual and magical than the West. He looked to me to confirm the sentiment, which I did my best to r…

Ministries of Presence: A Report from Nepal

By Cathleen Falsani

…e priorities of old-fashioned evangelism—where a premium was placed on the number of souls that were “saved”—have been supplanted in recent years by those of the social gospel, in which Christian ethics are applied to societal issues such as poverty, violence, preventable disease, ecological concerns, gender issues, and human rights. “More and more you are beginning to see people seeing the social aspect of the Gospel, where Jesus himself went out…

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

…of a Broadway show. Jesus is about to make his big entrance only his final number will feature the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Tom Evans, spokesman for Family Radio said their math for setting the return date came from a verse in Luke 17: “As it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be in the days of the Son of Man.” According to Camping’s prediction, the Rapture will happen exactly 7,000 years from the date that God first warned people about…

‘Heretics’ or ‘Atheists’? A Response

By Rachel Ozanne

…ce to its doctrine. In short, I became a nonbeliever because I took very seriously Christianity and its truth claims, not because I found them laughable. Given that many people currently understand the term atheist to mean, as Blanchard put it, “militant secularism,” I find her idea that a heretic can “claim some connection to Christianity” appealing. I also want a name that implies the depth of my engagement with the faith, as well as my continue…

What do the January 6 Commission, Covid Deaths and Gun Massacres All Have in Common? God’s Chosen

By John Stoehr

…n as merely “doing the right thing,” because no matter how moral or how patriotic it might be to call for establishing a commission, such calls are actually politics in disguise. In this view, the Democrats are not acting morally or patriotically. They’re trying to extract an advantage that the Republicans would never give up voluntarily. If the Republicans agreed to a commission, the Democrats would win, which would be intolerable from a party th…

Competing Visions of Family & Freedom at UN; Methodists Try to Avoid Schism on Sexuality; Catholic Cardinal Denounces LGBT ‘Demonic Ideology’; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ment. There is a widespread feeling that, despite impressive growth in the numbers and capacities of organizations promoting queer/LGBTIA+ issues, there has been little impact on the everyday lives of African queer/LGBTIA+ individuals and communities. Discriminatory laws and policies remain stubbornly in place in almost all countries, and the hostile public perceptions of queer/LGBTIA+ identities that sustain these laws and policies seem as pervas…