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Queer Repentance: On Not Surrendering to a Text, to Guilt, or to Habit

By Jay Michaelson

…is possible, is used as a weapon against sexual minorities. The desire to change—fundamental to tshuvah—is, when applied to homosexuality, unhealthy. For our community, “change” is a code word for repression, distortion, and fear. So LGBT people must either abandon repentance or queer it. If we are not to reject it, we must make it our own, make it more complex, set aside its oversimplifications. The good news is that this is a gift to everybody…

7 Women Scholars On the Gender Divide in Religious Studies, the Power of Mentors, and Leading While Female

By Rebecca Barrett-Fox

…n anyone else. It was astonishing when that study came out, and little has changed. We have to fight that and change it, not just for women but for the academy, because the long-term effect is that the university is less attractive to women. The answer to that is not for women to be childless. LEADING WHILE FEMALE Elaine Howard Ecklund: Even with an increased number of women working in the sociology of religion, there aren’t many women who are nam…

“Ex-Gay” is Anti-Gay, Disguised as Compassion

By Tanya Erzen

…urch will immediately refer her to an ex-gay ministry and encourage her to change. I knew a man at a ministry who recalled coming out to his pastor at age sixteen as “someone who is gay and wants to change” because knew his religious community would never accept him. Now, there are also Jewish, Mormon, and Catholic versions of the ex-gay movement. As Haffner notes, many mainline Christian churches and other religious organizations lack consistent…

Following Republican Playbook, German Conservatism Breaks the Post-WWII Taboo

By Annika Brockschmidt

…mp and Bolsonaro; sees socialists as “enemies of humanity”; denies climate change; has close ties to the Christian Right; wants to ban abortion, and supports unrestricted gun ownership. Schneider, who Die Welt has comically named “chief freedom reporter,” tweeted gushingly about Milei’s politics, claiming that she was “very much in love right now, except for the abortion issue, of course.” She doesn’t seem to have any problems with Milei’s other s…

Exodus “Ex-Gay” Ministry Closes Up Shop

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…the Bible” on homosexuality, the new organization has no hidden agenda of “change.” “We recognize our beliefs are not a trump card,” Rodgers explained. “We realize many, many churches hold a more liberal view on this issue and we believe it’s time for us to come to the table and value one another in the midst of our differing beliefs.” Rodgers also noted that the new organization would probably not seek to change other ex-gay ministries that con…

6 Overlooked Takeaways From a Reviewer of Controversial Texas Textbooks

By David R. Brockman

…ents from credentialed scholars. Sadly, in some cases, publishers actually changed their text to suit TTT, as when Pearson Learning (see page 16) removed from its world history text the factually correct statement that jihad “is most frequently used [by Muslims] to describe an inner struggle in God’s service.” In its place Pearson inserted more ambiguous wording: “For some Muslims, [jihad] means a struggle against one’s evil inclinations. For othe…

Reading Beinart and Lerner as Gaza Burns

By Ira Chernus

…ssing the fact that they are now the powerful masters. How did he came to change his mind? He says only: “In recent years, for reasons I can’t fully explain, I have been lowering my defenses” against the ever-present images of Palestinian suffering that left him unmoved for so long. Most of the newcomers to the Jewish American peace movement would say much the same: They’ve been moved by seeing the injustices inflicted on the Palestinians; but wh…

Marriage is for Everybody, Says Former Anti-Gay Evangelical

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…this interview, Achtemeier talks about how his encounters with LGBT people changed his heart and mind over the years. His new book is: The Bible’s Yes to Same-Sex Marriage: An Evangelical’s Change of Heart. Candace Chellew-Hodge : You don’t spend a lot of time in the book dwelling on the so-called clobber passages. Instead, you seem to keen to reach that “moveable middle” by talking about your process of approaching the Bible. I think it’s an effe…

Both the Joy and the Uproar Over the Pope’s Blessings for LGBTQ Catholics are Small Potatoes Compared to this Age-Old Church Problem

By Mary E. Hunt

…even though the Vatican touted it as the most important instance of church change since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. The problem is that the Synod, for all of its language of inclusion and moving stories of personal exchanges in the Aula (where the in-person sessions were held in October 2023), set the parameters for the blessing blow-up. The final synod document didn’t even include the terminology ‘LGBTQ+,’ which had been used in its…

Why Liberal Religious Arguments Fail

By Peter Laarman

…is that there IS no point to endless argumentation. Hearts and minds don’t change that way. They change when we share our stories and when we become present in a different way to those whom we wish to influence. The further point is that hearts change before minds do. It rarely works the other way around. And now some scientists believe that we don’t actually argue to arrive at clarity or truth—argumentation is a “social adaptation,” they contend…