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Mormons Fight Marriage Equality in Mexico; Is Catholic Church Italy’s Anti-Gay NRA?; Nigerian Anglicans Cut Ties With UK Diocese; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…id showcased anti-LGBT rhetoric and conspiracy theories. Mexico: President promotes constitutional guarantee of LGBT equality; Mormon Church objects As Mexico’s complicated march toward nationwide marriage equality continues, President Enrique Peña Nieto wrote in Huffington Post about initiatives he introduced in May to establish a constitutional right to marry, “independently of gender identity or sexual orientation,” as part of a broader effort…

Change, Not Charity: What Ails the New Left-Right Coalition Against Poverty

By Peter Laarman

…aith leaders who claim to care about the poor slurping up the same reality-free brew and proclaiming, essentially, that there are really No Enemies On The Religious Right and, by extension, No Enemies On The Political Right. Memo to religious middlers: God actually does take sides In recent years Jim Wallis has made himself the leading exemplar of what we might call the No Enemies On The Right viewpoint among religious celebrities. Wallis achieved…

Modernity’s Fraternity: What Dan Brown Gets Right

By Samuel Biagetti

…, science, artwork, and monuments in this novel are real.” As a student of Freemasonry, I can vouch that Brown’s claim is generally true. The strange rituals and traditions that the novel attributes to the Masons are all in fact practiced by some branch of Masonry. Dan Brown is able to work so comfortably with real Masonic symbols and lore because they resonate with his own sensibility. Not only do Brown and the Masons both love secrets and encode…

Faith for Fuck-Ups? A New Book Explores a Broader Vision for Christianity

By Jason J. Stellman

…vangelical or post-Christian altogether. I want them to know that a bit of free thinking and iconoclasm never hurt anyone, and that God can handle our occasional wrestling against him. He’s not nearly as petty as many of his spokespeople portray him! Are you hoping to just inform readers? Entertain them? Piss them off? I know that my book will be a bit scandalous to those who are theologically uptight, but that’s fine. I spent so much of my life s…

Book Burning and the Scapegoating of Islam

By Eric Reitan

…the West, book burning has come to symbolize the totalitarian rejection of free expression—a desire to enforce conformity of thought. While there is no doubt that something like this is going on with Terry Jones and his church (not to mention Phelps), there is another symbolic meaning that is more ancient and, I suspect, more instructive. I have in mind the symbolism of making burnt offerings to supernatural powers. Rene Girard is a philosopher wh…

New History Finally Recognizes Afro-Creole Spiritualists

By Paul Harvey

…lic, and hailed from economically successful families. Their families were free during the antebellum period, and they were politically active. Their séance records are utterly fascinating. Nearly all the communications were recorded in French, and messages arrived from Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon Bonaparte, John Brown, Montesquieu, Robert E. Lee, Confucius, Robespierre, George Washington, Jesus and Toussaint Louverture. And that’s an abbreviated li…

RDBook: Whither the Religious Left?

By Bill Berkowitz

…acknowledges climate change, for example, but he is a fierce proponent of free markets—and so ideologically rigid that it is difficult to imagine him getting behind the kinds of solutions that could address what needs to be done. Similarly, he is so fiercely antigay, and supports African political and religious leaders who advocate criminalization of homosexuality, that it is difficult to imagine that the HIV/AIDS work for which he receives such…

‘Religious Freedom’: Constitutional Principle or Electoral Politics?

By Frances Kissling

…hat is political, but respectful of the constitutional limits on religious freedom. It has correctly taken the position that public policies established to serve the common good require a clear and narrow definition of what is and what is not a religion. We do not just abandon the common good to unexamined claims that a public health or education provider is required by faith not to comply. We are prepared to give an actual religion an almost fre…

A Public Monument to Atheism—In Florida

By Becky Garrison

…think they’ve found a clever way to bring the Commandments in through the back door by invoking a “free speech zone.” They have to understand what that means—free speech means free speech for everyone. Those courthouse plazas may get awfully crowded….

Q Shaman’s New Age-Radical Right Blend Hints at the Blurring of Seemingly Disparate Categories

By Susannah Crockford

…und base underneath the town where alien experiments were undertaken, that free energy was possible if only the dark cabal hadn’t kept it from us to continue profiting from our labor, and that the banking system and wage labor were designed to keep us enslaved. Spirituality, they told me, was the route to freedom from these third dimensional machinations. The dark cabal wants to block spiritual evolution because it threatens their control. What’s…