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Pricey Tickets, Cranky Citizens, and Priests Behind Bars as Philadelphia Prepares For Papal Visit

By Anthea Butler

…ndals, two grand jury investigations, the imprisonment of a archdiocesan administrator, financial mismanagement, and the closure of Catholic schools have contributed to the decline of an archdiocese that once rivaled Boston or New York. The same month Pope Benedict announced the next WMOF, Monsignor Lynn of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia became the first diocesan administrator convicted in the United States of re-assigning pedophile priests. Lynn…

Mile-High Identity Politics: What We Can Learn From the Same-Sex Seating Controversy

By Eboo Patel

…have seen people give up their aisle seat to a senior citizen and take his middle. I have watched passengers with first class seats hand their tickets to uniformed veterans and sit in economy. Several times I have witnessed people move further back to allow a mother to sit next to her children. All of these required not only the hassle of moving, but also the discomfort of a worse seat. Sometimes the person with the better seat was asked, sometime…

The Key to Understanding the Federalist Society Isn’t Originalism — It’s This 800-Year Old Tradition

By Peter Schwartz

…udence and legal reasoning. It never participates in court proceedings, submits no amicus briefs and never serves as legal counsel. Which leads to the insistent claims of legal conservatives that the organization and its originalist methods are politically and substantively neutral. Of course, there’s more than a little bait-and-switch in these claims. From its inception, the official mission of the Federalist Society has been educational, not pol…

Atheist Nazis? The Pope’s Cheap Atonement

By Susannah Heschel

Adam Clayton Powell called it “cheap grace,” but we might call it “cheap atonement”: the effort by sinners to select which sins to acknowledge and repent. Pope Benedict XVI ended his heavily protested visit to England with a heartfelt apology for German bombings of England during the Battle of Britain; though he refused to accept Christian responsibility for the Holocaust, blaming it instead on pagans and atheists. Given that Cardinal Walter Kasp…

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

…complexities in their world; waiting out incessant air raids, navigating family dynamics, and the moral implications of dating Jewish men. And while Khader and his friends are free in many ways, they are also bound: bound by living as a Palestinian in Israel; being gay within sometimes conservative Arab communities; and bound by being labeled something they are not simply because of their religion, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. Khader is Musl…

Is Religious Freedom a Casualty at Ground Zero?

By Kambiz GhaneaBassiri

…nited States. Webb’s efforts failed, but he was followed by thousands of immigrants from the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and South Asia and by African Americans, who converted to varying forms of Islam, some of which, such as the Nation of Islam, were distinctly a product of African American experiences. They built American mosques and Muslim institutions in such diverse places as Brooklyn, Detroit, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Ross, North Dak…

Glenn Beck’s Cheap Grace

By Karyn Carlo

…to turn away from the hard work of repentance, who tickle our ears with promises of cheap grace, and offer a vision of the cross of Jesus that has nothing to say to the crosses, and lynching trees, of history. But, if we do, we will be settling for the gospel of Caesar, not the good news of Jesus Christ. Perhaps it is time to put down the chalk, stop drawing pyrotechnical conspiracy theories that play into our worst fears and listen, instead, for…

Amway, Religious Right Pyramid Scheme, Returns to the Motherland

By Bill Berkowitz

…days, Nutrilite, which the company calls “the world’s leading brand of vitamin, mineral and dietary supplements,” is one of the company’s leading moneymakers. The company’s most important product has always been selling its version of the American Dream: the notion that any person with a fair amount of desire, spunk, and initiative with a get-up-and-go persona and a little bit of up-front money, could shape their futures. They can get rich, and th…

Vandalism as Conversation-Starter

By Elizabeth Drescher

…h of a teen caught in a drive-by shooting in the King Park neighborhood of Grand Rapids, Michigan and the subsequent suicide of one of the suspected shooters as police closed in on him where he was holed up in a local hotel. A postmodern dream vision, the song imagines the initial murder, the response by the community and police, and the theological question that animated the last moments of the shooter’s life. It is a meditation on violence, deat…

The Forgotten Struggle Over Gender and Bigotry in Christianity

By Stephen J. Patterson

…ry Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003). 4. Everett Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 147–48. 5. Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Introduction (New York: Crossroad, 1983). 6. Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Be…