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Self-loathing is no joking matter.

A roundup of the week’s religion stories.

Jeffrey Stout’s Blessed Are the Organized is arguably even more relevant now than when it was published last year. Even then, the United States economy had collapsed in on itself. Barack Obama’s role had fully shifted from community organizer to Beltway compromiser, and the grassroots was being overgrown by Tea Party “astroturf.” But now—as politicians wrestle our economy even lower to the ground at the behest of organized elites, and the voice of the majority seems to grow ever fainter in their ears—the kind of real grassroots organizing Stout writes about seems all the more to be what we need.

The message of General Comment No. 34 is not only a clear condemnation of the blasphemy laws of countries such as Pakistan, which despite having ratified the ICCPR in 2008, continues to impose the death sentence for blasphemy and “defiling” the name of Prophet Muhammad. The Comment equally repudiates the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, which has upheld Austrian, British, and Turkish laws against blasphemy and religious insult by invoking a sui generis right to “respect for the religious feelings of believers.”

Frequently assumptions are made about what happened after the Council without actually doing the social history necessary to make accurate descriptions of what occurred in parishes. Conservatives cite the mythical nuns-wearing-miniskirts but they neglect to interview Catholics of the “Greatest Generation” who actually lived through the transitions. Something called “the Sixties” gets blamed for all the problems in Catholicism, but the nitty-gritty scholarship has not been done to legitimate pointing fingers.

“Jesus set up two kingdoms, church and state, but one law and one ruler over both.”

A conversation with Brook Wilensky-Lanford, author of Paradise Lust: Searching for the Garden of Eden.

Ghana’s President John Mills gives mixed signals on LGBT rights