Religion Dispatches
…usual number of patients at his abortion clinic, Aid For Women, in Kansas City, Kansas. But then, this has been an unusual few weeks. Since mid-June, Dr. Yeomans (and the other abortion providers in Kansas) have found themselves scrambling to see as many patients as possible before today; as of July 1, these facilities will not be able to offer abortion services until they show compliance with new regulations handed down only weeks before. “The…
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…nge the city through community arts interaction.” What needed to change in Seattle? I think people in Seattle and other cities are increasingly disconnected from each other in spite of technology like social media that supposedly helps us stay connected. When people are in an experience where they’re closer to others, it just helps us remember that we’re here on this planet with other humans, not just ourselves, with headphones, watching Netflix a…
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…was caught after the murder, fleeing halfway across the state, he had the phone number of an Operation Rescue leader on his dashboard—the tip of the iceberg in terms of the broader connections he’d built with anti-abortion extremists. The church, Roeder would later testify, emerged as the only place he could find a shot at Tiller, around the elaborate security measures the doctor had learned to follow at his clinic and home. “Justifiable homicide…
Read More…community is tamping him down with wet newspaper. Earlier this month, the city’s arts rag Seattle Weekly released a “Comic History of Northwest Cults,” counting the disgraced megachurch pastor as just the most recent in a long line of religious charlatans. Among SW’s wall of shame: Franz Edmund Creffield’s “Brides of Christ” involved mostly young women and ended in adultery, murder—and the founder’s claim to have caused the San Francisco earthqua…
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…to continue to shrink into the insularity and disorganization that caused the Philadelphia Archdiocese to decline so precipitously? It remains to be seen. Meanwhile, faithful Catholics and others who want to see the Pope may be losing heart. 10,000 tickets for the Pope’s Speech at Independence Mall sold out in two minutes on Tuesday, with 394k people trying their best to get a few. Tickets are already being scalped at $100 and up on craigslist. I…
Read MoreVia the Kansas City Star, the Kansas State Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing tomorrow to answer the question: do our religious freedom laws adequately protect us from the gays? I’m just kidding about that characterization, but after the failure of HB 2453, which would have permitted discrimination by business owners and government employees, conservatives in Kansas are still pressing for a modification of the state’s religious freedo…
Read More…politics. More to the point, he has horrible politics and he is loathed by Kansas. His clan has been terrorizing Topeka for decades. Hanging Westboro around Brownback’s neck isn’t entirely fair, but see the point about bigoted people above. Engle and the rest of the Religious Right deserve to be challenged. Not simply because they have horrible politics, though that’s also the case, but because their values are not universally held. In fact, there…
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…famous member decries materialist greed on a regular basis. At Jesuit run Seattle University, adjuncts voted to form a union in 2014, but according to the Seattle Times, “ballots were locked up” while the university appealed to the NLRB on religious freedom grounds. According to Seattle University professor Emily Lieb, in April of 2015, “some 20 faculty, students, and allies were arrested in an act of civil disobedience near campus to protest the…
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…ssivism I encountered in college helped me take pride in my color and ethnicity. I believe identities matter a great deal, and that expressing those identities in public is necessary and natural. But I think there are challenges, contradictions and blind spots in the broader movement of cultural progressivism which ought to be raised. The airline example reveals some of these. First of all, there is a religion-shaped hole in the worldview of cultu…
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…notions of “human dignity” and “human flourishing,” Catholic natural law—an 800-year-old tradition dating back to Thomas Aquinas—is a lens that offers utter clarity to conservative Catholic jurists, activists, policymakers, and scholars as they observe, describe, and engage the world. The power and sharpness of this lens allow them to confidently snap every human movement—every human desire and motive and act—into its divinely appointed and proper…
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