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The Gospel Church and the Ruining of Gay Lives: An Interview with Anthony Heilbut

By Douglas Harrison

…ristianity devolves into the image of Bishop Eddie L. Long posing on his smartphone. In recent gospel, [the trend has been toward] the most outrageously secular performers. They do all kinds of things that are smack out of hip-hop or rap, much less R&B. But at the same time, they are exceptionally pious. Like a man named Tye Tribbett. On the one hand, he’s doing stuff that’s just ready for Hot 40 radio, and on the other, he’s very moralistic. And…

Atheists Ignore Islamophobia at their Peril

By Chris Stedman

…ns, Christians, Zoroastrians, and others met at the Humanist Community at Harvard to attend a memorial for the shooting victims at a gurdwara in Medford, Massachusetts. An atheist in attendance told me that he had never experienced anything like it before, but perhaps the most moving sentiment came from a Christian minister who said during the memorial: “Personally, I am embarrassed that it’s taken a tragedy for me to come here and introduce mysel…

Awakening, Counter-Awakening, and the End of Church

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…and exploring their spirituality in different ways.’ I think eventually a large number of those people will re-affiliate in some way, shape, or form—but when they do, the actual institutions of religion will be very different because of the demands those people make on new kinds of churches. I look at that whole arc of people who are leaving church because of the failure of the institution, and I don’t see that as threatening. I see that as a real…

Evangelicals ‘Crossing the Tiber’ to Catholicism

By Jonathan D. Fitzgerald

…himself as a “victim of Church history classes that start in 1517,” the year Martin Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses. That is, until he took a course entitled “Foundations of Judeo-Christian Thought” at TKC. It “raised certain questions within me,” he says of the course. White cites Boston College philosophy professor and TKC visiting faculty member Peter Kreeft’s Catholic Christianity as a factor in his conversion, but he also points to a nu…

Gambian Prez Rails Against Gay ‘Evil Empire’; Irish Priest Comes Out During Mass; Trans Talk on Tunisian TV Sparks Debate; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…gospel of inclusion, while shaking the conservative set, has attracted a far larger number of people back to the Church, especially the young.” The Philippines is the bulkhead of the faith in Asia, where 130 million Catholics now account for about 12 percent of the world total. That’s up from 5 percent in 1910, when 65 percent of the faithful were in Europe, according to a Pew Research Center’s survey. Europe now accounts for less than a quarter…

Muslims in America, Fifty Years Later: New Poll Shows Pride and Optimism In the Face of Bias

By Edward E. Curtis IV

…n of Islam as dangerous and Muhammad Ali as a traitor. Today, though media are far more sensitive to issues of bias, stories about Islam and Muslims in most mainstream media outlets, whether liberal or conservative, unconsciously reinforce negative stereotypes. Coverage of Islam is associated more often than not with violence, gender discrimination, political instability, intolerance, and other qualities that most Americans find troubling. Six out…

Participant Discredits the Original Ex-Gay Study

By Warren Throckmorton

…ported a Kinsey rating of 1, and three other men reported a rating of 2. (NARTH, p. 29) NARTH’s description is flawed in at least two ways. First, the Pattisons did not do pre- and post-change interviews. Instead, they did one interview with the 11 men asking them to reflect on the time when they identified as gay and then their experience in the present. Second, only three men reported no indications of homosexuality, subjects 3, 4, and 9. NARTH…

Who’s Scared of Polygamy? A Restrained Case for the “Slippery Slope” Argument

By William E. Smith

…ith churchgoers overtly coded as Evangelicals) are supporting polygamy in larger numbers, a strawman Douthat then refutes. Unlike Silk and Douthat, I welcome this nascent debate—one that really has already begun (see this and this)—and I think there’s enough praise to go around for why we’ve begun to have it. Both point to important contributing factors, yet both are mistaken in focusing, when it comes to religious groups, only on polygamist Mormo…

Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, and Pro-Home Birth

By Katherine Don

…s who explicitly place childbirth care along the spectrum of reproductive care are using a framework that doesn’t make sense. “This idea that we should be in bed with people who are pro-choice because we’re allowing women to choose where to give birth—it’s actually pretty disgusting,” Prentice says. “That allowing a woman to give birth where she chooses has anything to do with killing a baby.” “Choice” and “Informed Consent” During the 1970s, a…

New Report: Muslim Terrorism a ‘Minuscule Threat’

By Hussein Rashid

…r of 2 million Muslims in the U.S., that means 0.01% of Muslims are involved in terrorism-related activity over the span of a decade. Per annum, it is 0.001%. If we take a more realistic number of 4 million American Muslims, the numbers become 0.005% over a decade, or 0.0005% per year. Last year there were 14,000 homicides in the U.S., and with a population of 300,000,000, that’s about 0.0005% of the population are murderers. The report ends with…