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The Religious Right and the Tea Party on “Education Choice”

By Julie Ingersoll

This week controversial Maine tea party governor Paul LePage signed a law making Maine the 41st state to establish a charter school program. The state of Maine has debated charter schools for years but this year the controversial tea party supported governor and the increased hostility toward public employees unions (especially, in this case, the teachers’ union) gave the pro-charter forces the boost they needed. The New York Times recently repor…

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

…“feudal, homophobic and very much misogynist”. Uganda: Police arrest pride participants; parade cancelled under mob threat from govt official Organizers cancelled Saturday’s pride parade “after a tense meeting between a senior government official and one of Uganda’s top human rights lawyers,” reports BuzzFeed’s Lester Feder. The government’s Ethics Minister Simon Lokodo reportedly threatened to mobilize a mob if the event went forward. Earlier in…

PCUSA’s Nod to “Traditional” Marriage Understandable, but Not Accurate

By William E. Smith

…ng to their conceptions of marriage. Notice that Presbyterians, like Episcopalians, most evangelicals, and nearly every American Protestant (and unlike so many Christians in the past), can marry after the death of a spouse, can marry a third or fourth cousin without it being considered incestuous, and cannot marry Christ. From a broad historical perspective, therefore, the PCUSA’s new position on marriage is less a revolt from tradition than a min…

A Peek Inside the ‘Onion’ of Scientology

By Kristin Rawls

…s, and, sure, they would like us to be more like them. Even though they’re part of our society, they’re very separate in many ways. Would it be fair to compare their process to evangelical Christian ex-gay therapy? Philosophically speaking, Scientologists, like some evangelical Christians, believe you can be cured of being gay—or at least the gay people I have met who were members of Scientology say that was what they believed and were told when…

Naked Jihad

By Kate Blanchard

…ke.) In the end, small-f feminism is as diverse as the women (and men) who participate in it. If Tunisians and Ukrainians want to get naked in order to make a statement, more power to them. And if Pakistani or Parisian women want to tell these women off, so be it. Each of them will reap consequences, both predictable and unpredictable. None of us can control the effect our words, actions, and images have on other people, so we do the only thing we…

How Fitbit Helps a Conservative Evangelical College Monitor Students’ Bodies For Christ

By Jonathan Root

…honesty, but also that students “practice good health habits and regularly participate in wholesome physical activities.” ORU, like other evangelical universities, does not only enforce negative prohibitions—it also prescribes a positive vision of the “good” student. This prescriptive model—what ORU has called its “whole person” concept since its opening in 1965—is epitomized in the school’s longstanding focus on its sometimes controversial studen…

A Question for Hobby Lobby Supporters…

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…aception. So is the salient difference the size of the list? Is there some number of things-this-paper-can-be-used-for that puts the employer at a safe moral distance from the act, where previously they had been complicit? If so, what’s the number? How long does the list of possible uses have to be to assuage the employer’s conscience enough to let the employees use their compensation for things the employer finds morally repugnant? See, here’s th…

The Internet Is Not Killing Religion, Religion is Killing Religion

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ier might well have declared, offering data on the correlation between the number of pipers in a village and the number of butts in local church pews. Across the pond in the American colonies, religion was not faring much better. In his masterful reconstruction of American religious history, Awash in a Sea of Faith (from which the previous anecdote is drawn), Jon Butler reports that Christianity was “in crisis” in the New World: Pennsylvania aside…

Fasting and Faithy Friends of Convenience

By Sarah Posner

…policy, too, and suggesting that they prefer some God talk to a Democratic Party with the backbone to stand up to Paul Ryan is, I would imagine, more than a bit insulting. But let’s not delude ourselves into lamenting the administration’s apparent diss of Jim Wallis. After all, liberal religious activists have long bristled at the Democrats’ embrace of certain religious figures who are “safe” because they’re not too subversive for conservatives—es…

Episcopal Conference Lives Up to Episcopal Jokes

By Julie Ingersoll

…might be returning to giving us just what they expect of them. The Episcopal Diocese of Florida met this past weekend in Jacksonville for their annual convention, themed, “One Body,” which began with a service led by presiding bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori calling for unity. In recent years the convention has been tense with debates over the future of the diocese and even the Church itself. But this year, “nothing much happened,” according to…