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Pope Denounces Gender Colonization; Indonesian Court Considers Islamist Request To Criminalize Homosexuality; Egypt’s Grand Mufti Says No One Has Right to Harm Homosexuals; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ncis decries ‘ideological colonization’ on gender LGBT hopes for the who-am-I-to-judge Pope Francis sank a bit this week when the Vatican released the transcript of a meeting between the pope and bishops in Poland last week, in which Francis used harsh language to decry what anti-LGBT conservatives call “gender ideology.” From the transcript: I would like to conclude with this aspect, since behind all this there are ideologies. In Europe, America,…

Is Army’s New “Humanist” Designation Just Semantic Hooey?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…on Adam to name all the plants and animals in the Garden of Eden (Gen. 2:19-20) helps humans to understand their surroundings and their place in the newly created world. So, too, the renaming of Abram as Abraham (Gen. 17:1-14) expresses his new, covenantal relationship to God and marks the future trajectory of his lineage. Indeed, in many religions, choosing a name that expresses a close coherence between self-identity and religious identity and…

Naked Jihad

By Kate Blanchard

…gance, and felt somewhat ashamed. We are always so ready to pounce when non-Western women are threatened. Indeed, as scholar Lila Abu-Lughod points out, even Americans who are not feminists—often on religious grounds—seem ready to fight wars in the Middle East, ostensibly in order to “save” oppressed Muslim women. Moreover, I tend to agree with Muslimah Pride that the freedom to strip is far from the pinnacle of women’s liberation. (I much prefer…

American Sin: Why Pope Francis’ Mercy is Not Our Mercy

By Kaya Oakes

…But only 2 percent of American Catholics go to confession regularly. Three-quarters of them only go once a year, if ever. Mercy is depicted in our media not as divine intervention, but as human instinct. After the Catholic Church published Humanae Vitae in 1968, the Vatican’s disapproval of birth control meant that the vast majority of Catholics who used it—and continue to use it—no longer felt the church was an authority on sexual matters. This…

The Progress of Christ in Commercial America: A Review of Chris Lehmann’s The Money Cult

By Peter Laarman

…Strong, an early Social Gospel leader who ended up championing the Spanish-American War and the need for “Anglo-Saxons” to Christianize the world. Also the deeply reactionary James W. Fifield, Jr., a pivotal architect of Southern California anti-union conservatism, and Kenneth Hagin, the godfather of the hugely influential Word of Faith movement. A few minor quibbles: at one point Lehmann has late 18th-century “Calvinists” pitted against “Congreg…

‘Cult’ Is an Inaccurate, Unhelpful and Dangerous Label for Followers of Trump, QAnon, and 1/6

By Catherine Wessinger

…desired collective salvation. On January 6, 2021, it probably seemed to a number of participants and supporters in the Euro-American Nativist Millennial Movement that they had finally achieved the critical mass of adherents to overthrow Congress. There are many varieties of millennialism. As I wrote in The Oxford Handbook of Millennialism: “A nativist millennial movement consists of people who feel under attack by a foreign colonizing government…

Religion and Other Animals

By Paul Waldau

…nimals than have children. Polls consistently indicate that an astonishing number of people—in some cases more than ninety-nine percent—hold their dog or cat to be a “family member.” Communities of faith are among the institutions that are most responsive to the complex connections between humans and other animals. One increasingly finds that contemporary religious communities have reinstituted the ancient practice known often as “blessing of the…

No Conspiracy Theories Needed: Abortion Foes Cry Racism

By Kathryn Joyce

…what they call Hoye’s “special calling to work for the end of the genocide-by-abortion taking place in the African-American community.” Hoye’s fellow activists rose to the occasion, announcing via press release that a host of black pro-life leaders would descend on Oakland for the sentencing to stand in solidarity with Hoye against “a deliberate attempt to silence the Church and its prophetic role in protecting the innocent lives in our community…

Evangelical Pastor Argues for Full LGBT Inclusion: “I Think It’s Inevitable”

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…litmus test for orthodoxy. Given that, I believe there will be a lot of out-of-hand dismissal of the book. Do you think the moveable middle of evangelicalism can use your book, especially its biblical exegesis, as a way to move toward acceptance for LGBT people? Evangelicalism is a very diverse, broad movement and there are many different expressions. I think, very shortly, there will be an expression of evangelicalism which will be inclusive of L…

Islamic Intellectual Leadership at a Crossroads

By Amina Wadud

…ntly, women scholars had a list discussion about the merits of activism vis-à-vis the promotion process for most US academies. If you play too much of a role in the day-to-day lives of Muslims at every level—but especially where the majority abide, which is rank and file—then your credentials as an intellectual are questionable. For women, that is. For men there are no such constraints. So even if these three men did not approach matters of politi…