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Amway, Religious Right Pyramid Scheme, Returns to the Motherland

By Bill Berkowitz

…mption”); Redemption is the name of a heavy metal band, and the title of a number of record albums including one by the metal group Vomitory, and the hip hop duo GRITS; “Redemption” was the title of a two-part episode on television’s “Stargate SG-1,” and also of a “Star Trek: The Next Generation” two-parter. “Redemption Song” was one of many of Bob Marley’s extraordinary musical contributions, and if you haven’t seen The Shawshank Redemption, rent…

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

By Michelle Lelwica

…ew thousand words over their original word limit, but I still had to cut a number of compelling stories of people who have struggled with body shame because of internalized cultural/religious norms and narratives about weight, disability, chronic pain or illness. I also had to omit some of my analyses of examples of the culture of physical improvement. For instance, in the chapter on aging, I nixed a rather lengthy critique I’d developed of Deepak…

What Irish Marriage Vote Means for Catholic Church; The Lonely Fight for Equality in Belize; Progress and Backlash in Tunisia; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…visit Belize for all the things that make “the Jewel” an ideal place to relax: coral reefs, paradisiacal white beaches, a green-azure sea. It is a deeply Christian country, with a Constitution that proclaims the “supremacy of God” as a first principle. Recently, it has seen a surge in Pentecostalism and other proselytizing strains of faith. Although bounded on two sides by Latin American countries with more liberal attitudes toward same-sex relat…

Restoring Dignity: The Employee Free Choice Act

By Peter Laarman

…ry of brutal union suppression by employers who figured out that it’s much cheaper to take the penalties currently handed out for labor law violations (which are extremely weak and rarely delivered) than to allow workers to unionize without interference in free and fair representation elections. By the Numbers The cold, hard facts are these: Polls consistently report that 60 million Americans would join a union tomorrow if they could, which clearl…

The Incredible Shrinking Catholic Church

By Paul Gorrell

…le from its ranks and fights against their rights, ignores the diminishing number of priests and the effects of this shortage on Church communities, and calls on Catholics to form the “perfect society” resembling the ecclesiology of Opus Dei. It is no surprise that Pope Benedict comes from a country—Germany—where the percentage of Church members attending Sunday mass is one of the lowest in the world. Strict adherence to orthodoxy will not be popu…

No Conspiracy Theories Needed: Abortion Foes Cry Racism

By Kathryn Joyce

…n part by denouncing her as a bigot and a racist who wanted “to reduce the number of children [born] to the nation’s poorest economic groups, which tend to be persons of color and other minorities.” The Pro-Life Action League made a similar criticism this week against the Guttmacher Institute, claiming that the Institute’s call for publicly-funded birth control “takes aim at the poor by recommending more government spending on programs to reduce t…

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

By Peter Montgomery

…us right” within the CSW: The CSW has become a space in which a formidable number of Christian right-wing organizations network and actively work to try and roll back pre-existing international agreements on sexual and reproductive health and rights and recent multilateral SOGI gains. These organizations—the majority of which are US-based – have grown increasingly sophisticated in spreading their activism globally and in engaging youth (particular…

Review: Is the Religious Right Dying?

By Laura R. Olson

…or point to evidence that a new religious left may be asserting itself. A number of progressive Christian blogs, such as Street Prophets and Faithful Democrats are afire with discussion of a different kind of marriage between religion and politics that emphasizes peace and justice issues instead of socio-moral concerns. In the baffling 2008 presidential primary season, Republican candidates aligned with the religious right failed to make much hea…

Are We Entering the End Times for Mainline Seminaries?

By Elesha Coffman

…s in both the number of churches that could support such positions and the number of people eager to take the more challenging, but lower paying, church jobs that remained. Some seminaries shifted their missions to serve the academy or society more broadly, while others trained more part-time, second-career and lay pastors. These shifts were less abrupt than decisions to close or merge a seminary, but they were often quite jarring for faculty and…

How Religion Shapes (or Doesn’t) Our Views on Public Issues

By Daniel Schultz

…dy late last week looking how religious beliefs influence perceptions on a number of different issues. A quick-and-dirty look at the results would tell you that religion doesn’t change much, with a few notable exceptions. For example, this surprising statistic: “60% of those who oppose gay marriage say religion is the most important influence on their views.” One wonders where the other 40% comes from. Likewise, social issues come in dead last on…