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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

…, two days after the demise of Brazilian soccer great Pelé. Four times the number of people attended Pelé’s funeral as showed in St. Peter’s Square for the former Cardinal Ratzinger. His influence spanned three pontificates—the later years of John Paul II’s tenure under whom Benedict was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and later Dean of the College of Cardinals, his own pontificate from 2005-2013, and the first decade o…

Blood and Politics — Christian White Nationalism in the Age of Obama

By Bill Berkowitz

…s a White Christian republic rather than a multiracial democracy. And in a number of cases they turn their conviction that White Christians have superior civil and political rights—over those they deem “Fourteenth Amendment” citizens (everybody else)—into fraudulent schemes with fake money. In other instances, they establish “Christian” courts and militia groups that act as if they are legitimate arms of “lawful” government. In this belief system,…

Why We Won’t Let Jonestown (Or 9/11 or Sandy Hook) Die

By Kelsey Osgood

…e story of a small group coming to grips with a mass cultural trauma. As a number of notable sociologists put forth in their book Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (University of California Press, 2004), society, to put it simply, can experience trauma like an individual can. As with the individual, there are a few things that make a society more vulnerable to trauma. “A society emerging from a major war, suffering from diminished economic r…

Growing Up Cult: A Memoir of Life with Sri Chinmoy

By Brittany Shoot

…nmoy’s devotees never experienced the group this way. But the role of guru carries risks; for the soul of the teacher as much as for the student. It is apparently all too easy to succumb to a particularly virulent form of narcissistic disorder when people are throwing rose petals at you all day. And when a teacher loses his bearings, the signs are hard to miss. As Tamm grew up and witnessed the guru’s increasingly erratic posturing (elaborate weig…

Dispatches From the Rhodian Shore: A (Tough) Love Letter to Religious Studies

By Todd LeVasseur

…y worried that the Earth will soon lose its ability to capture (or “sink”) carbon out of the atmosphere due to oversaturation that will then lead to structurally impoverished ecosystems. Their fear is that by 2040 (the freshmen we’ll be teaching then are being born right now) the ability of land to be a carbon sink will be halved, severely amplifying global warming feedback loops. 5. The cultural stories and values we have about the worth and role…

New Mormon Anti-Gay Policy Sparks Mass Exodus From Church; Christian AID Workers in Africa Refuse to Help Gay Refugees; Ukraine Rejects, Then Accepts EU-Required Gay Rights Law; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…e said, “The church needs a Stonewall.” Hong Kong: Catholic Bishop Defends Cardinal, Compares Homosexuality to Drug Abuse Bishop Michael Yeung Ming-cheung of the Catholic Diocese of Hong Kong, defending a political letter from Cardinal John Tong opposing marriage equality and anti-discrimination protections, compared gays to drug addicts, reports the Washington Blade’s Michael Lavers: “The church doesn’t have any enemy and it wouldn’t criticize an…

My Womb for His Purposes: The Perils of Unassisted Childbirth in the Quiverfull Movement

By Kathryn Joyce

…as in the past helped promote an extreme version of the practice taught by Carol Balizet, head of the obscure, Tampa, Florida-based Home in Zion Ministries, that is condemned even by fellow unassisted childbirthers. Balizet, a former nurse and the author of a number of books on Christian home-living, motherhood, and home birthing, represents a fringe expression of the Quiverfull suspicion of mainstream, institutional experts. She condemns banks, p…

Is Obama the Antichrist? Why Armageddon Stands Between the President and the Evangelical Vote

By Matthew Avery Sutton

…op Christian hits, Larry Norman’s “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.” The movie scared countless teenagers (and probably an equal number of adults) into preparing for the rapture. Millennial fervor swept evangelicals again in the late 1990s on the heels of the two-term Clinton presidency. Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins published Left Behind, the first in a series of novels that grew into the best-selling series of the past decade (until they were finally…

Exclusive: Christian Right Bill Mill, Project Blitz, Hasn’t Gone Away, It’s Just Gotten More Secretive

By Frederick Clarkson

…Judeo-Christian heritage.” Category 3 limits access to reproductive health care and health care for LGBTQ people by allowing religious or conscience exemptions from the law. (These bills don’t directly deal with abortion access, ceding that area to Americans United for Life, which has served as the main bill mill for state antiabortion legislation.) “Opposition to the measures in this category,” the new playbook warns, “will often be well-organize…

The Resurgence of Right-Wing Anti-Semitic Conspiracism Endangers All Justice Movements

By Ben Lorber

…ros funded a group of communists responsible for orchestrating the migrant caravan. Across the ideological landscape of Trumpism, there roam a number of such specters—not only “socialists” and Soros, but “globalists” and “Cultural Marxists,” among others—painting a picture of rootless, nefarious forces on a mission to subvert traditional American values. We’ve seen this before. Throughout the 20th century, insurgent far-right movements deployed co…