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Obama’s Gay Marriage Support Shocks Black Church

By Anthea Butler

…s, stunted sexuality, homophobia, and sexual abuse are competing for issue number one in their churches; at many, they are tied at the number one slot. It is high time to for the leaders of the black church to ‘put away childish things’ and to engage in a real conversation about sexuality, same-sex marriage, and the homophobia embedded in the black church community. Pontificating and posturing props up preachers, and does little to edify congregat…

Growing Up Gay in 666: Fred Phelps in Retrospect

By Scott Blaine Swenson

…people say, ‘we don’t hate LGBT people’ and leave it there,” distancing themselves from Phelps and priding themselves on their beliefs. “But they allow unjust situations to exist,” Sweeting says. Topeka attorney and Phelps adversary Pedro Irigonegaray says it more starkly: “Not to oppose hate is to endorse it.” When he was 13, in the early 1960s, Irigonegaray’s parents took him to the State Capitol in Topeka to show him where laws were made, impre…

Religious Leaders On Anti-Muslim Frenzy: “Silence Is Not An Option”

By Sarah Posner

…hey said people in their own faith traditions now seek to trample for Muslims. David Saperstein, executive director of the Religious Action Center for Reform Judaism, one of the groups that organized the meeting with Justice Department officials to urge a more robust law enforcement response to the rise in anti-Muslim activity, expressed hope interfaith groups and the government could “work out the most effective way to parallel actions to lift up…

Elaine Howard Ecklund Wants to Dispel Myths Surrounding Religious Resistance to Science

By Sammy Feldblum

…ing and just how overstretched they were, that people came. We had quite a number show up. They just wanted to share common resources, and to figure out what each other was doing, and how they could team. There’s a real felt need in the community to team together to serve the city that happened during the storm. I think it’s still happening in terms of people appealing to religious resources for help with clean-up, for long-term financial help. An…

Conservative Hardliners at Synod Prompt Question: “What Are We Doing Here?”

By Patricia Miller

…m the first small group discussions held this week indicate that a sizable number of bishops believe that the preparatory document is all doom-and-gloom and doesn’t do enough to celebrate the sizable number of Catholics who are successfully leading a traditional Catholic family life, reports John Allen: The synod’s final report ‘should begin with hope rather than failures, because a great many people already do successfully live the Gospel’s good…

Exclusion is Causing Great Harm: A Conversation With Suspended UMC Pastor Rev. Cynthia Meyer

By Joel Pitney

…than in the leadership? My congregation has been very supportive. A small number of people chose to leave. Some of them not because of their feelings around the issue of homosexuality, but they just struggled with the church being in the news. But that was a small number, and most folks have been very receptive. Many immediately began telling me about their family members, and all of their personal stories. My vulnerability in sharing let them op…

Islamic Intellectual Leadership at a Crossroads

By Amina Wadud

…In 2009 a Wahabbi-funded publication called “The 500 Most Influential Muslims” was published. Nice and glossy, more than 200 pages, with the entire text also online, and given away free in so many places I cannot count them. Propaganda for sure. My shaykh said to me, I see you made it into the book. I told him I do not need the recognition of the particular parties involved, including the neo-Orientalist scholar who edited it, to affirm my contrib…

For Conservatives, the Future Looks Dim… and Gay

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…%) say they think engaging in homosexual behavior is a sin, while an equal number says it is not. Those who believe homosexual behavior is a sin overwhelmingly oppose gay marriage. Similarly, those who say they personally feel there is a lot of conflict between their religious beliefs and homosexuality (35% of the public) are staunchly opposed to same-sex marriage. The even split on the issue of whether homosexuality is a sin, interestingly, is ac…

Mormonism’s “9/11 Mosque Moment”

By Joanna Brooks

…olleague Hussein Rashid pointed out in this must-read piece), Mormons, the number two most disliked religion in America, have no business contributing to public rage against the number one most disliked religion in America. Nor in trafficking in falsehoods like “Islam is an ideology, not a religion,” a line I’ve been hearing from a few Mormons in recent days. Islam is in fact a religion for which Mormon leaders from the time of George A. Smith…

The Messiah is Not Coming

By Peter Laarman

…umbers given out by the Census Bureau earlier this month: big jumps in the number of Americans losing compensated work for working poverty or worse, and concomitant big jumps in the number of people losing health care coverage. The thing is—and labor market specialists all concur—these blows are no longer cyclical phenomena that will be reversed once “the economy” really starts humming. “The economy,” in the way that mainstream economists gauge it…