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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…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…
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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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…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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…d in late October with a subpoena from the lawyer for an accused priest in Kansas City. In St. Louis, it came from lawyers for the Archdiocese. I think the Kansas City bishop is going to say this is just an individual priest and his individual defense lawyer and I can’t tell him how to defend himself in court. But from my perspective that’s a distinction without a difference. I believe this is clearly a decision on the part of both of these bishop…
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…ge Tiller. It’s no surprise Brownback has repeatedly clashed with Equality Kansas, which condemned his appointment to the ambassadorship. Two years ago he removed civil rights protections for LGBTQ state workers. Tom Witt, executive director of Equality Kansas, offered this pungent comment on Brownback’s commitment to religious freedom: “His use of religion is little different than that of a bully wielding a club. His goal is not to use religion a…
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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…
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