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What Fidel Castro’s Death Means for LGBT Rights in Cuba and More, in This Week’s Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…d. Although Magufuli has not said anything publicly about homosexuality, a number of his appointees have made harsh remarks. Critics of gay rights say this nation — which has large numbers of Muslims and Christians — must protect traditional values. In an August speech, Paul Makonda, the regional commissioner of Dar es Salaam, the capital, threatened to arrest people who were linked to gay men on social-networking sites. “If there’s a homosexual w…

Workers Once Forced the Social Gospel Into Churches—Can It Happen Again?

By Eric C. Miller

…to go to church, pays, I mean, in actual dollars and cents.” Those who did lose faith in the industrial order eventually also lost faith in the church—but never in Christianity. Their persistent commitments both to faith and to unions precipitated the churches’ eventual embrace of social Christianity after the turn of the century. Yes, even as Chicago’s class-conscious workers navigated an oppositional relationship to the institutional churches, t…

Data-Mining Denominations: Same-Sex Marriage Edition

By Daniel Schultz

…people are by intensity, measured with the simple hack of subtracting the number of people Strongly Opposed to same-sex marriage from the number Strongly In Favor. Not surprisingly, since the Unitarian-Universalists only had 6 percent opposed, their position on the chart hardly budged at all. Other groups traveled a little more. Mainline Baptists, for example, strongly disapprove just a little more than they strongly approve. Evangelical Baptists…

Jonestown at 40: The Real Conspiracy Is More Disturbing Than the Theories

By Rebecca Moore

…been acquired, and dress rehearsals occurred, all with the complicity of a number of individuals. Unfortunately that cohort included my older sister Carolyn Layton and my younger sister Annie Moore (both of whom died in Jonestown). But quite a few others were part of the conspiracy as well, including the team of young men from Jonestown who ambushed Congressman Ryan and his party as they attempted to leave. Knowing the identities of the conspirato…

ABC’s Hit Sitcom Black-ish Does God, Pushes Theological Respectability

By Anthony B. Pinn

…onfines of human history. Some, as Dre’s character demonstrates, fear that loss of belief will mean a loss of morality and ethics, a surrender of the values that drive us forward toward the “good.” But that fear is misguided. Those questioning belief in God don’t reject values, they simply demand a different grounding for those values. Rather than saying we should behave in certain ways because God requires it, as outlined in some sacred text and…

Rome Has Spoken and Rome Is Finished: The Vatican’s Sexual Abuse Summit ‘Failed Miserably’

By Mary E. Hunt

…ed minors and some covered it up. What’s so mysterious about that? A large number of minors have been sexually abused by a large number of clerics. Period. Full stop. It’s simply the beginning of a hideous story that includes the abuse of seminarians, nuns and other women, children of priests, and more, all of whom merit summits of their own. Francis’ discussion of power fell flat. He claimed that the sexual abuse of minors is an abuse of power. H…

The Plot to Turn the Synod into a “Plot”

By Patricia Miller

…nod is to take up. The Supreme Pontiff may, if he so chooses, increase the number of members of the Synod of Bishops by adding bishops, or religious to represent the religious institutes, or clerics who are experts, to the extent of fifteen percent of the total number of the members mentioned in articles V and VIII. Despite this, Douthat assures us that “as a Catholic,” he expects “the plot to ultimately fail; where the pope and the historic faith…

Satanic or Silly: Does Yale Press Censorship of Cartoons Insult Muslims?

By Daniel Martin Varisco

…ges. Muslims, like members of other faiths, express their displeasure in a number of ways over those who belittle their prophet. In 2008, for example, a petition was circulated online to remove a 17th-century Ottoman manuscript image of Muhammad from the Wikipedia article on the prophet. Despite accumulating over 455,000 signatures and the Wikipedia community’s refusal to remove the illustration, still no violent acts have resulted. Lost in the de…

RD News Round-Up—Oct.14, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…14. Charities in crisis: The disastrous economic situation with its record number of housing foreclosures and rapidly rising unemployment rates will undoubtedly leave many families in need of assistance. Over the past eight years, the Bush Administration has been dedicated to demolishing the government’s responsibility for maintaining a social safety net and turning those responsibilities over to charities—both faith-based and secular. The financi…

How Not To Defend Atheism

By Vlad Chituc

…ntry. The most charitable number I could find was from Gallup, putting the number of Americans in 2014 who say they don’t believe in God at 11%. To make things frustratingly worse, other atheists have been calling Silverman out for falsely inflating the number of atheists for more than four years. And last year, I specifically asked Silverman if he would stop reporting the stats on “nones” as being representative of atheism, and he told me he woul…