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

By Anthea Butler

…n’t be good. On top of it all, the current leader, Archbishop Chaput, has clashed with Philadelphia’s Catholics over parish and school closings and, more recently, with the firing of a gay teacher in a Catholic school not overseen by the diocese of Philadelphia. Chaput, a culture warrior, is on center stage as the Pope and the WMOF come to town. Of course, Archbishop Chaput has said he welcomes gay families to attend the WMOF, as long as they aren…

Netanyahu’s Speech, Lane’s Trip, and the Impossibility of Boycotts

By Sarah Posner

…y Law Center think of the AFA, the American Renewal Project, or their Holy Land trip. Even the Anti-Defamation League calling the trip “inappropriate” failed to move these Republican Party leaders to reconsider their decision. No matter that David Lane, organizer of the trip, champions Christian nationalism here at home, or that the AFA and in particular, its egregious non-spokesman, Bryan Fischer, promote Islamophobia, xenophobia, and homophobia,…

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

By Eboo Patel

…isagreement. When marginalized groups (Jews and women, Africans and gays, blacks and Latinos) have a dispute, it is not always because they lack a sufficient analysis of western colonialism. Often it is because a dimension of their substantive identities are in conflict. A healthy diverse democracy is a place where people who disagree on some fundamental things do it without killing each other, and are able to move on and work together on other fu…

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

By Peter Schwartz

…ctive 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…

Atheist Nazis? The Pope’s Cheap Atonement

By Susannah Heschel

…e Third Reich. Jesus, theologians argued, was born in Galilee, an area populated, they claimed, by racial non-Jews, including Aryans from Iran; his message was welcomed by Galileans, in contrast to the Judean Jews who put him to death. Grundmann, together with theologians, pastors, bishops, students—both Protestant and Catholic—established the “Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Church Life,” financed by the Prot…

Palin’s Israel Trip

By Sarah Posner

…ly could in Florida. Frum, a Republican Jewish Coalition board member, complains in his column that Palin snubbed the group’s offers to sponsor her Israel trip, as it has done for other presidential hopefuls, instead booking it through a Christian tour agency. He thinks, perhaps, that Palin is miffed that he and other RJC board members have been critical of her, but that she’s unwise to rebuff them because they could be so helpful to her. But this…

Glenn Beck’s Cheap Grace

By Karyn Carlo

…descending way, but with real justice. In a nation marked by centuries of slavery, lynching, Jim Crow laws, legal segregation, and systemic racism, that is not easy to do. We are bound to feel defensive sometimes. If we listen, we are going to hear things we would rather not hear. Some of us are going to be tempted to buy into the vision of Glenn Beck and others who make it easy to turn away from the hard work of repentance, who tickle our ears wi…

The Contested Religious Powers of Baseball on Display in Cuba

By Sean O'Neil

…a is a believer in that legacy. But the power of sports to produce heightened emotional states of unity, which scholars call “collective effervescence,” can also give it a shared power with religion to occlude injustice in this world, to bury it in cheap, playful sentiment. Sports, like religion, and like the American Dream, will thus continue to be contested symbolic terrain, where the stakes can prove much more complicated than zero-sum games, a…

Our Lady of Good Hope and Excellent Behavior: Why this Apparition and Why Now?

By Lisa Bitel

…images are much easier now, at least for the middle class that can afford plane tickets to Medjugorje and Civitavecchia. Pilgrims learn from major apparition sites exactly how to watch for the Virgin and what to do when someone spots her. And it’s much easier for the news of an apparition to reach reporters, now that visionaries and their witnesses use video cameras and the World Wide Web. President Obama made the news last week when he made a pil…

Spiritual Unplugging, Or What to Do When There is Wifi at the Ashram

By Matt Hamilton

…e boyfriend? It was the sort of self-evaluation that usually ends with me flagellating myself and shooting off a text or email (mostly) driven by guilt. But sending another perfunctory, apologetic note wouldn’t suffice now, if ever. I was tired of that detour. As I walked back to my room—a small bungalow—the only thing I could do was think of my mom, sautéeing vegetables while watching the evening news; my dad, reading the newspaper and sipping co…