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Trayvon, the Toulouse murders, and the sanctity of childhood.

For the poet Javier Sicilia, a grieving father whose son was murdered by thugs last year, the pope’s visit is historic as well. Yet for him, and for those wounded voices he seeks to amplify, the pontiff’s arrival has less to do with pushing back secularism than with long-overdue attention to the ravages of Mexico’s drug wars.

A new book of popular history provides an exhaustive and detailed history of the brutal yet bureaucratic Inquisition, arguing that it helps explain what the world is today.

The enemy of my enemy is… my enemy too?

A political, not theological, co-belligerence.

Called Perkins “one of the godliest men I’ve ever known.”

Watching Higher Ground felt like catching a glimpse of a mythical creature I’d let myself imagine but never thought I’d see in real life. But suddenly there it was, projected on a big screen: sophisticated and complex theological thinking, a female protagonist interested in ideas and books and God, a friendship between two women that has very little to do with men and everything to do with trusting your body and your mind, and the insidious nature of religiously sanctioned sexism and its devastating effects.

In 2002, Catholic theologian Christine Gudorf predicted that “within a generation or two,” Catholic hierarchical teaching will change to encourage contraception in marriage and to allow some abortions.

Total surrender to heteronomous ethics is unhealthy, period. It may be prescribed by some, but it is also what leads to fundamentalism and religious violence. Gay people know this firsthand: to love oneself as a religious queer person requires interposing one’s own experience between oneself and the text. The text in its traditional reading cannot be correct, because it is incompatible with a notion of a loving God. But that truth is only known by allowing experience, conscience, and discernment to speak.

Remember the movie Joyful Noise, the Dolly Parton and Queen Latifah flick about a small-town gospel choir from the South competing for national recognition?