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How a Powerful ‘Ex-Gay’ Pastor is Chasing the Latino Vote

By Katherine Stewart

…o invade his privacy but because by his own account those intimate details are part of what define him as the public figure that he is. Still, as I take in the glow of the late-afternoon California sun reflecting off the Home Depot across the parking lot, I’m on edge. Did I get him right? Will he be angry? Two months ago, he retweeted @realDonaldTrump’s claim that the “FAKE NEWS media”—including the “failing @nytimes”—is “the enemy of the American…

How Not To Defend Atheism

By Vlad Chituc

…excuse we lay on top of our actions, then moral indignation at religion’s harms are unfounded. Silverman, though, wants to have his cake and eat it too. He argues that posting the Ten Commandments on public property is a hate crime since, (italics in the original) “it has inspired and still recommends the murder of [atheists] and a whole lot of other people.” Silverman never quite explains how religion doesn’t motivate any good, yet somehow incite…

Religion Round-Up: What’s Going on in Religion Around the World

By Diane Winston

…bers are, according to Pew, surprisingly high. Moreover, they represent a large number of people, “nearly equal the estimated number of religiously affiliated adults in the United States” Accordingly, the 1-plus % of the Chinese population that identifies itself as Muslim equals some 20.3 million people—a population almost as large as Saudi Arabia’s. (More to the point, as one of China’s ethnic minorities, Muslims are not bound to the one-child pe…

The Plot to Turn the Synod into a “Plot”

By Patricia Miller

…s meals in Rome, and then go home. (And for the record, conservatives have argued for years that the church isn’t a democracy.) What Douthat doesn’t explain is why it wasn’t a “plot” for Pope John Paul II to stack the bishops’ ranks with conservatives; purge liberal bishops, theologians and dissenters from the church; declare teachings like the prohibition against women priests fundamentally unchangeable by future pontiffs; and then tee-up his own…

Rome Has Spoken and Rome Is Finished: The Vatican’s Sexual Abuse Summit ‘Failed Miserably’

By Mary E. Hunt

…t after the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report was issued with its shockingly large number of victims and offenders. That would have also been right after reports came out that Cardinal Theodore McCarrick had abused countless seminarians and priests. The Vatican crowd could have saved themselves a lot of grief. Think of what would not have been on the table. Many terrible revelations have emerged since September: Lists of hundreds of credibly accused…

Satanic or Silly: Does Yale Press Censorship of Cartoons Insult Muslims?

By Daniel Martin Varisco

…tan, drone bombings in Pakistan and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, there are far more relevant pretexts available than an Ivy League book that may not even warrant review in major newspapers. The peddlers of Islamophobia in the media, popular trade books, and blogs would have us believe that radical extremists are lurking everywhere just waiting for an excuse to promote violence. To suggest that deadly protest over these images can be rekindled…

“I Speak to God in Public”: Are Young Black Millennials Reclaiming a Theology of Resistance?

By Joshua L. Lazard

…ans aren’t going to church like they used to. Beyond that, much of the research around trends—specifically with millennials born between 1981 and 1996—reveals a much more complex American landscape. The larger takeaway in the 2014 study was that the American church was losing members—and that became the sexy cover story. Lost in the weeds was the fact that affiliation with historically black denominations was more or less even (the loss was less t…

Pope’s US Visit Provokes Intense Attention; New Vatican Book on Man-Woman Complementarity & New Int’l Report on Christian Role Models for LGBT Equality; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…list Mo Rocca was among those on the altar at the papal mass in Madison Square Garden to do a reading. Rocca read from the book of Isaiah in Spanish; his mother is an immigrant from Colombia. The pope ended his US trip in Philadelphia, where the Catholic Church’s World Meeting of Families was taking place. LGBT Catholics were forced to move a gathering on gender identity issues to a Methodist Church after Archbishop Charles Chaput instructed a loc…

Why Religious Exemptions Matter

By Sarah Posner

…eedom of a citizen, and another for political pressure to be applied by a particular religious group (or a collection of religious groups sharing a particular religious view) to gain an exemption from a generally applicable law. That’s why church-state separation advocates are this afternoon expressing concern that the administration too readily accommodated religious interests. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for the Separation…

Speaking for Hinduism in the Absence of a Conversation

By Murali Balaji

…the academic study of Hinduism in India was (and still is) dominated for years by Marxist scholars, who based their study on a historical materialist perspective that seeks to cast Hinduism as an oppressive social institution. It’s ironic that Jerryson notes the praise of Doniger’s book from Pankaj Mishra, one of those who does come from a Marxist approach to Hinduism. As an academic Marxist myself, I see the limitations to applying such a framewo…