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55% of Utah Mormons Believe LGBT People can “Change”

By Joanna Brooks

…studied and understood. Any doctrine that would be used to exclude a good number of the earth’s people from full equality before the law and God should be very carefully examined. When it comes to gay issues, most Mormons have only the muddiest understanding of what life is like for gay people or about the doctrinal reasons their LDS leaders say and do the things they do. In fact, most Mormons have only the muddiest understanding about what their…

The Devil is in the Details

By Amina Wadud

…if lost or stolen, but only if you first write down each and every serial number. Then you have to keep this information somewhere that’s not the same somewhere you keep the checks. But then they really do NOT spend just like cash—especially abroad where we meet and mix with people in their own places. Such places are not subject to our being guests there. So I do tend toward keeping travel cash in an odd place. (No, I’m not gonna share with you…

What Pence and Kaine Reveal About Divides in Catholicism

By Patricia Miller

…has evolved over the past few decades. Both Pence and Kaine were raised in Midwest, middle-class, observant Irish-Catholic families. Pence started out as a Democrat, voting for Jimmy Carter in 1980, but like many other more conservative-minded Catholics switched alliances to the Republican Party, voting for Ronald Reagan in 1984. The Jesuit-educated Kaine, meanwhile, was attracted to Liberation Theology’s “blending of Catholicism and socialism,” i…

Do Space Aliens Need Baptism? The View From Gliese 581g

By Paul Wallace

…ad about the discovery of a new Earth-like planet or read about NASA’s upcoming Kepler planet-finding mission or watch a movie like Contact, I grow excited over—and, like Brahe, even a little afraid of—the vast unknown. My mind boggles. What’s really out there?, I wonder. Yet I cannot help but detect a kind of desperation in our quest for extraterrestrial intelligence. I can’t point to any single source of this feeling, but I can’t shake my sense…

Commies, Blacks, Jews, the UCC and Other Threats to America

By Daniel Schultz

…the religious left. It means we’re doing our job. And just in case anyone missed the number of religious progressive groups endorsing the rally, here’s a list culled from One Nation site. Their list of endorsers is pretty long, so I apologize if I missed somebody: Rainbow PUSH Coalition The Shalom Center Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations Sikh Coalition The Religious Institute The Community Church of NY Unitarian Universalist Pen…

Halloween, Evangelicals, and the Macabre

By John W. Morehead

…these disturbing tendencies won’t be disappearing soon, there are some promising changes on the horizon. A small group of evangelical academics, including the noted scholar of new religions Gordon Melton, are calling for a more informed and sympathetic understanding of the broader Western esoteric tradition in the Sacred Tribes evangelical academic journal. Also, new books are being produced that draw upon scholarly historical and ethnographic ap…

We Were Here Before September 11th

By Amina Wadud

…t some Muslims use to justify mistreatment of outsiders, including violent mistreatment, is used to justify mistreatment of women inside Islam. I condemn it, and have done so for decades here and abroad. As regrettable as violence is, I don’t apologize for it. I don’t think an apology is beneficial. I think working for justice is beneficial and I did that: before and after September 11th, and I see no reason why I should not continue. But here’s t…

Why Anti-Gay Bullying is a Theological Issue

By Cody J. Sanders

…ychotherapeutic organizations reject notions of the pathological in sexual minorities, dominant religious and cultural ideology is in a state of crisis. It is no longer an unquestioned assumption that heterosexual experience represents the definition of reality for all people. The power to define reality for the masses is at stake and this power comes with all manner of political and ideological implications. Thus, there is a vested interest on th…

The American Media’s Longterm Ambivalence About the Papacy

By Peter Manseau

…anks to their enormous popularity, Luce’s publications had their share of imitators. None came close to testing the dominance of Time until one would-be rival was bought by the Washington Post Company in 1961. Newsweek had been founded by an ex-Time staffer almost thirty years before, and perhaps as a filial rejection of a former employer’s concerns, in the beginning Newsweek published very little about religion generally, and less about Catholics…

More Than Big Hair and Money: Jim, Tammy Faye and the Media “Holy Wars” of the 80s

By John Wigger

…, Heritage USA, and a private satellite network that reached into fourteen million homes in the US. That year, six million people visited Heritage USA. Jim and Tammy lived in luxury, buying vacation homes, expensive cars and clothes, and traveling first class with an entourage. Then it all came crashing down. In March 1987 Bakker resigned in disgrace after his 1980 sexual encounter with Jessica Hahn in a Florida hotel room became public. Stories e…