Seeing Is Believing: Questions about Faith-Based Organizations That Are Involved in HIV/AIDS Prevention and Treatment

New report out with Catholics for Choice (pdf):  In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, recalls Calle Almedal, a longtime HIV/AIDS advocate, Catholic hospitals and other institutions which were mainly staffed by nuns were the only ones that would treat patients dying of AIDS. From New York City to Uganda, as AIDS victims were [...]

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Abortion as “Black Genocide”

New story at Public Eye: This February, a highly provocative series of 65 billboards went up around Atlanta, which featured an African American infant and the proclamation, “Black Children Are an Endangered Species.” The signs directed viewers to a website, TooManyAborted.com, created by the Radiance Foundation—a vaguely defined antiabortion and “personal transformation” nonprofit founded by [...]

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An Architect Re-Imagines the Synagogue as Ark, Shelter, Floating Fortress

New piece up at Religion Dispatches: The single-dwelling home has long been seen as the consummate test of an architect’s skill. For Jonathan Block Friedman, a theoretical architect and professor at Long Island’s New York Institute of Technology, that test left out buildings designed for community functions: birth, death, and marriage. “Just as we cannot [...]

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From Home Birth to Home Abortion

New story at Slate: Angie Jackson, the Florida mother now known as the abortion tweeter, isn’t the first woman to try to demystify abortion by talking about her story publicly. Since Romper Room personality Sherri Chessen got a very public abortion in 1962 after taking thalidomide, women have tried to erase the lingering shame of [...]

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The Dynamics of God

New review at Harvard Divinity Bulletin: Given the enmity that recent works on evolution and God have fostered, pitting science and rationalism against spirit and faith—with “new atheist” celebrities casting believers as Scopes-era fools, and creationist culture warriors declaring natural selection the foundation of the Holocaust—Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God stands on remarkably conciliatory [...]

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Meet the New Haggards—Same as the Old Haggards?

New Q&A with Gayle Haggard at Religion Dispatches: Before Ted Haggard’s 2006 fall from grace—the result of a scandal involving drug use and a male prostitute—he and his wife Gayle coauthored a breezy, heavily illustrated marriage guide: From This Day Forward: Making Your Vows Last a Lifetime. Post-scandal, the book seemed to epitomize the unrealistic demands the Christian [...]

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The Abandoned Orphanage: Hillary Clinton’s Mother Teresa Moment

New story at Religion Dispatches: On February 4, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was the surprise keynote speaker for the 58th annual National Prayer Breakfast. The Breakfast is the one public event organized by the secretive Washington network, the Family, a group of elite fundamentalists who minister to DC’s powerful and wealthy who are seen as the [...]

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Evangelicals’ Adoption Battlecry

New story up at The Daily Beast: For the past week, the news from Haiti has been dominated by the story of 10 American evangelicals from Idaho who were caught at the border of the Dominican Republic attempting to take 33 Haitian children, many with living parents, out of the country without documentation. The Americans, [...]

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Military Abortion Ban: Female Soldiers Not Protected by Constitution They Defend

“You hear these legends of coat hanger abortions,” a 26-year-old former Marine sergeant told me recently, “but there are no coat hangers in Iraq. I looked.” Amy (who prefers not to use her real name) was stationed in Fallujah as a military journalist two years ago when she discovered she was pregnant. As a female [...]

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The Anti-Gay Highway

New Religion Dispatches Q&A on Kapya Kaoma’s Report on the Mutually Beneficial Relationship Between US Evangelicals and African Antigay Clergy A new report  released November 18 details the role that US-based renewal church movements have played in mobilizing homophobic sentiment in at least three African countries. “Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S. Conservatives, African Churches & [...]

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