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Hold Your Applause: Potential Changes to Roles of Catholic Women and LGBTQ+ People May Just Be Vatican Breadcrumbing

By Mary E. Hunt

…oses. That’s how shaky this process is unless there’s structural change. A more democratic process would help, but note that the Southern Baptist Convention did its dastardly deeds at a meeting of 10,000 delegates. Oy vey, religion. The Synod is considered the most significant global Catholic event since Vatican II. I predict, with the fervent hope that I am wrong, that come 2025, when all of this is over, many women and queer people may wonder wh…

A Jewish Perspective on Reparations

By Moriel Rothman-Zecher

…ad map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name.” More than money The two cases, post-Holocaust Germany and post-slavery-and-segregation America, are, of course, not identical. The German state’s most severe crimes against the Jewish people were concentrated into a relatively short and exceedingly brutal sliver of history, after which most of the surviving Jews left Germany (and Europe). Germany, in turn, was forced by int…

Transgender and Christian: Finding Identity

By Jori Lewis

…ets at the church every Sunday in a makeshift library on the second floor. Moshay Moses, a transwoman with warm brown skin and a curly, honey-blond bob, said when she and some other people started the group they had a vision. Here, there should be no talk of drugs or passing or surgery. Here, they would be doing “spiritual surgery” to break down those negative walls of Jericho that have kept them from recognizing themselves as spiritual beings. On…

Contrary to Claims of Anti-Trans Muslims, LGBTQ+ Acceptance is Widespread in the History of Islam

By Ali Olomi

…d writes, “In Mombasa, both male and female homosexuality is relatively common among Muslims, involving perhaps one in twenty-five adults.” In the 19th century growing European dominance in the region began to align gender norms with that of Europe. Muslim modernists and reformers increasingly adopted Victorian sexual values and gender norms as signifiers of modernity. The Egyptian reformer Rifa’a al-Tahtawi wrote approvingly of the French: “Among…

Along Came a Spider: What the Pope Doesn’t See

By Anthea Butler

…their sexuality, they should be subject to the rule of law and summarily removed from office. More often than not, this is not the case. Unfortunately, the road to success for a bishop seems to owe more to the Peter Principle (“rising in the hierarchy to the level of one’s incompetence”) than anything else. In the Catholic Church hierarchy, this means you can go pretty far. It is high time to stop the shuffling shell game, and for the church to ad…

The Religious Case Against Religious Discrimination in Cakeshop Case

By Patrick Hornbeck

…eme Court has long held, going back to a late-nineteenth-century suit by a Mormon believer who argued that Utah’s prohibition against bigamy threatened his right to practice his faith, that when a law is “generally applicable”—that is, when it doesn’t single out any particular religious group—it is constitutional for such a law to burden some individuals’ religious practices when the government has a compelling interest at stake. That’s the kind o…

Debunking the Myth That Democracy Is “Incompatible” With Islam

By Asma Afsaruddin

…. Disenchantment with US policy in the Middle East and the campaign to “promote” democracy under Western military occupation in Iraq, for example, did not dampen the desire of these populations to elect their own representative governments through fair and transparent elections. At the same time, substantial Muslim majorities, male and female, want the Sharia to be at least a source of legislation in their countries, seeing no disjunction between…

Black Churches are Burning: Is It the 1990s All Over Again?

By Katie Day

…y. In 1995, two members of the Ku Klux Klan burnt Mt. Zion to the ground almost exactly 20 years ago to the day of last month’s blaze. Once again Mt. Zion has been reduced to ashes, but the FBI says the likely cause of last month’s fire there was a lightning strike, not hatred. Intuitively, the smoke smells like a hate crime, a violent act meant to intimidate the African-American population. But is it? At the outset, the obvious needs to be stated…

A Secret History of Satan

By W. Scott Poole

…sters” to Roman Catholic priests understand exorcism. Billy Graham, in a famous sermon in 1974 where he insisted that demonic presences lived in the very celluloid of the film, went on to describe demonic possession in exactly the same way the film had done. Second, I hope to point out that America’s historic sense of its own innocence and righteousness, and the concomitant belief that its enemies represent the demonic Other, helps explain our his…

The Gospel of Contradiction: An Interview with Mary Gordon

By Nathan Schneider

…cting of the Enlightenment, but I am post-Enlightenment in that I am a postmodernist. Postmodernism gets a bad rap, but what it tells us is that all we see depends on where we’re standing, which is only one place among many. That is the liberation and the grief of postmodernism—you have to always know that you’re not seeing something of possibly enormous importance. To ignore that challenge is to ignore the challenge of our age. Another outgrowth…