Religion Dispatches
…job conditions that led to the 1968 strike and prompted King’s arrival in Memphis. He said he and his fellow workers were treated “no better than the garbage” he has collected for 55 years. He described how he was forced to carry rusted cans on his head, as the wet garbage and maggots leaked down to his collar and the back of his shirt, of riding the bus home and people complaining that he smelled because the city refused to provide showers. Most…
Read More
…tive interpretation. Multiply ambiguous, it is a strange concoction of any number of animal and human forms, as well as a sphinx; itself a hybrid monster. Moreover, the Chicago Picasso intimates both the Egyptian and Greek sphinxes—an amalgam of cultural styles. An ambiguous, almost inscrutable object, it is an enigmatic icon and the icon of an enigma; its very presence confronts the populace with a riddle. The riddle is not simply what the Chicag…
Read More
…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 More
…she loves.) Cardinal George leans on his bishop’s crozier during a mass in Chicago. Photo via the Archdiocese of Chicago. Above all, he was a deep thinker. About the philosophies he studied, earned one of his two doctoral degrees in, and taught as a college professor. About the improbable arc of a life that took him from a teenager hobbled by polio and rejected by his diocesan seminary because of it; to the head of his religious order—the Oblates…
Read More
…e even-more-shocking charge being leveled by the attorney general that six Illinois bishops are refusing, even now, to post, on their diocesan websites, the names of some 149 clerics accused of sexually abusing children who are or have been in Illinois. And why, apart from the fact that it’s obviously the right thing, should the bishops do this? Because, as the state’s top law enforcement authority stresses, each of these men is already listed on…
Read More
…ous identity is in conflict with the meaning that the woman sitting in the airline seat assigns to her gender. All of this can be summed up in a simple turn of the original formulation: for whom may the personal be political, and how? A Religion-Shaped Hole I am a proud and grateful product of cultural progressivism. As a brown kid who grew up in the western suburbs of Chicago wanting to be white, the cultural progressivism I encountered in colleg…
Read More…in his head. A service revolver was found by his side. • October 2, 1953, Chicago, Illinois. 14-year-old Patrick Colletta was shot to death by 14-year-old Bernice Turner in a classroom of Kelly High School in Chicago. It was reported that after Turner refused to date Colletta, he handed her the gun and dared her to pull the trigger, telling her that the gun was “only a toy.” A coroner’s jury later ruled that the shooting was an accident. • Octobe…
Read More
…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…
Read More
…f he would like to know more about the final campaign that brought King to Memphis. At the urging of his friend and confidant Rev. Ralph Abernathy, King came to Memphis to support the striking workers. It was part of his Poor People’s Campaign, a project to unite America’s underclass—black, white and brown. He marched in solidarity with more than a thousand men. Two weeks after his death, the city agreed to recognize the union and a 10-cents-an-h…
Read More
…m? Though CPS decline to elaborate further, a July 26, 2019 article in the Chicago Tribune provides a clue. Hannah Leone’s article includes some disturbing information about the program based on the harrowing recollections, before the Chicago Board of Education, of Dasia Skinner, a substitute teacher, and Jade Thomas, a fourteen-year-old high school student. After hearing their testimony, the CPS chief education officer noted that while she person…
Read More