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Two Women and a Mosque: A Convert Community Grows in Panama City

By Aliyya Swaby

…ple attend Friday prayer services every week, most of them Indian. But the number of Panamanian converts is rapidly growing. Bhattay said about two or three new converts come to Jama Mosque every week. Six months ago, the mosque began offering classes in Spanish — instead of just in Urdu — to accommodate the growing demand. There is no discrimination in the Muslim community in Panama City, Bhattay said. “Maybe ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, there…

Mormons Prepare to March in Seven LGBT Parades this Weekend

By Joanna Brooks

…o friends and family, including Mormons in mixed-orientation marriages and parents of gay LDS children. Their telling of personal stories has an impact on close-knit LDS communities and kinship networks: when Mormons recognize how many families in their wards and stakes are grappling with LGBT issues, it makes it much more difficult for these issues to be framed in oppositional “us” versus “them,” “Mormons” versus “the world” terms, as it was duri…

The Anti-Trans Hate Machine’s Conspiracies Don’t Stop at the US Border

By Annika Brockschmidt

…Republicans like Elise Stefanik joining the hateful chorus. This smear campaign is accompanied by an all-out assault on LGBTQ (but especially trans) rights on the state level in Republican-controlled legislatures, as Religion Dispatches has previously reported. And while American readers might think that the off-the-rails culture war rhetoric, which has actual, devastating consequences for the lives of all LGBTQ people, is relegated to the US, th…

Leper Messiah: A Jesus Freak’s Search for the Meaning of Bowie—A Critical Novella

By Mark Dery

…Moonage Daydream,” he boasts that he’s “a rock ‘n’ rollin’ bitch,” a “mama-papa coming for you”; in “Lady Stardust,” he slip-slides between genders, morphing into the ladyboy of the title. Ziggy’s twofold nature—gender-bending ladyboy, switch-hitting bisexual, “mama-papa” (an image recalling the freakshow hermaphrodite known as a half-and-half)—aligns him with the intersexed or androgynous deities of pre-Christian myth. This archetype, which the h…

A Jewish Perspective on Reparations

By Moriel Rothman-Zecher

…nal essay, Coates concludes by offering a potential historical parallel: reparations paid by the German state following the Holocaust. “Only 5 percent of West Germans surveyed reported feeling guilty about the Holocaust, and only 29 percent believed that Jews were owed restitution from the German people,” writes Coates. Nonetheless, as part of the framework of broader reparations that the Allied Powers obliged the German government to pay, it was…

No ‘Christian Compassion’ in Tony Perkins’ Response to Anti-Gay Bullying, Suicides

By Andrew Marin

…hat’s the point of free will. However, it wouldn’t be free will unless the partnered gay Christian has the ability to choose to live as a partnered gay Christian. Once these ideas were given voice the conversation quickly shifted, as each heard the other for the first time. When social policy, theology, and personally-tied emotions are parted for even the slightest moment, it becomes clear that at a base level no one wants their story or their jou…

It’s The Apocalypse, Stupid: Understanding Christian Opposition to Obamacare, Civil Rights, New Deal and More

By Daniel Silliman

…Billy Graham and, by extension, modern evangelicalism? Billy Graham gets a pass from a lot of scholars who pay very little attenion to his apocalypticism. I think that’s wrong. I think it’s been a core of his ministry. In 1949, when Graham had his first major revival in Los Angeles, the famous one that put him on the map, the revival began just days after Harry Truman announced that the Soviets had tested an atomic bomb. So Graham used this to say…

The Religious Right Goes Global with “Demographic Winter”

By Kathryn Joyce

…telling me about wolves returning to the streets of European towns. Not as part of some Vermont-model wildlife-recovery scenario but as emblems of a harsh comeuppance mankind is due—they’re stalking out of the forests like an ancient judgment, coming to claim mankind’s ceded land. We’re sitting in a sunny Main Street cafe in Front Royal, Virginia—a beautifying ex-industrial town in the Shenandoah Valley that, as the far edge of DC’s suburban spraw…

It’s Bring Your Gun to Church Day

By Bill Berkowitz

…training of weapon use in a public environment, be it a church, amusement park, or shopping mall. ++++++++++ Crossing Paths: Rev. Joseph Lowery and Rev. Sun Myung Moon While many people no doubt believe that the operations of Rev. Sun Myung Moon are so last century, there is every indication to believe that Moon’s political influence will last well into the future. Now celebrating his 90th birthday, Moon* has designated his son, the Rev. Hyung Ji…

“Real” Evangelicals Don’t Support Trump? Not So Fast…

By Neil J. Young

…r “never” attend church still see themselves as evangelical, they do so in part because of a capacious evangelical theology that holds up the born-again experience as the singular determinant of true Christianity while allowing for a range of worship practices and secondary beliefs. Although most evangelical theologians would argue that religious conversion should bring with it certain behaviors, including regular church attendance, clearly many A…