Religion Dispatches
…he Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco recounts how this gay-positive church struggled with how to welcome a very attractive transgender woman who walked through their doors in the mid 1980s. Some straight men in the congregation felt odd when they learned the woman they’d felt attracted to had been born male, while some women did not want to share the bathroom with her. After a month or so this pe…
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…the stained glass ceiling” at the 12,000-member Glide Methodist Church in San Francisco, becoming the first woman to serve as a senior pastor at any of the denomination’s 100 largest congregations in the U.S. It was there that she experienced first-hand the expectation that she would bring her whole self to lead worship. “I have been blessed to be out because my congregations expected it of me,” she explained. “And here’s what I’ve found: Wheneve…
Read More…t held in Budapest 20 years ago in 1997, and last year it drew over 20 thousand participants. In May, Budapest will host this year’s World Congress of Families gathering, a networking and strategy-sharing event for anti-LGBT and anti-SRHR groups worldwide. Malaysia: Human Rights Watch reports on rise of anti-LGBT Sharia codes Human Rights Watch reported on the brutal murder of a transgender woman in Kuantan city, connecting it toward a shift in go…
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…race or religion, had known mental health issues. Likewise, a substantial number of the men on the Brady Campaign list were not previously identified as having psychological problems, but were “driven” to violent rage by financial and relationship crises. So we cannot name any specific cluster of circumstances that prompts such behavior, though we do know that ready access to firearms is a factor. All of which is to say, yes, the intimate enemy,…
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…tephen and Ina May Gaskin, plus a few hundred of their hippie friends from San Francisco, had founded The Farm, an intentional community in Tennessee. There Ina May helped to start a midwifery center, and in 1977 wrote Spiritual Midwifery, for which she became well known. In her way, Ina May and her midwifery colleagues from The Farm were, like the BWHC, trying to reclaim women’s health for women. Like the BWHC, Gaskin continues to call for greate…
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…ed to say. And really these Jesuits did get in the way.” This weekend, thousands gathered at the UCA to mark the twentieth anniversary of the assassinations by honoring the memory of those who died: Ignacio Ellacuría, a philosopher and theologian who served as the university’s rector; its academic vice-rector, the pioneering social psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró; Segundo Montes, chair of the sociology department and the university’s human rights…
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…, murder of the unborn, redistribution of wealth and other evils have been sanitized and propagandized as “basic human rights.” Thus, when this arrogant man stands before the U.N. and decries those nations that refuse to embrace his special brand of pagan relativism, we shouldn’t be surprised if those nations push back. And so they push back. To be sure, in addition to triggering our own spike in angst, Obama’s fevered push to “call evil good and…
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…l two months later and the debut of the Cockettes at the Palace Theater in San Francisco the following New Year’s Eve—are examples of what Hakim Bey, a queer anarchist social critic, calls the Temporary Autonomous Zone. “The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State,” Bey writes, “a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, befo…
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…nother for the Idaho panhandle—border regions intended to draw the maximum number of attendees. Election, medical, and vaccine conspiracists, along with insurrection veterans like Flynn, Eric Trump, Sidney Powell, Mike Lindell, and Roger Stone grab most of the media attention. But a disturbing religious dimension has received far less attention; that is, until November, when Flynn blurted out their broad intention at a San Antonio rally, “If we ar…
Read More…aim BLM, not all French citizens can proclaim #JeSuisParis and be believed. This is because, as one of the women interviewed in the Times made explicit, “My heart is 100 percent French, but it feels like I have to prove my ‘Frenchness.’” As a white, Jewish woman in liberal San Francisco, there is a chasm between my experiences of privilege and the discrimination felt by Muslim Frenchwomen and black Americans. This is why The New York Times was rig…
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