Religion Dispatches
…ice the 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…
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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 More…. Republican Jeff King, chair of the Judiciary Committee, wants to examine Kansas’s RFRA to determine whether any additional protections are warranted. “The answer might be that we don’t need to go anywhere,” he told the Star. But Michael Schuttloffel, executive director of the Kansas Catholic Conference, told the Star the 2013 law has “gaps,” because, being based on the federal model, it doesn’t take into account the overturning of same-sex marri…
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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…, not the fourth century … You’re not free to practice your religion in my airline seat.’ ‘This is male entitlement .. the height of male arrogance.’ One comment referred to this as a ‘back of the bus’ issue; as in, women being asked to move in such circumstances was tantamount to assigning them a lesser status as citizens and lower dignity as human beings. Other readers proposed that airlines set aside special seating for men requiring such accom…
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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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…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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…like. Bill Donahue sees a criminal prosecution or a civil lawsuit as an angry threat when the overwhelming amount of victims see those as the best way to warn people about dangerous predators and in most instances, the only way. Where do things stand now? We have pro-bono lawyers in Kansas City, not yet in St. Louis. There’s a hearing on April 20 in Kansas City on the Church’s motion to compel, seeking to make SNAP turn over more records and make…
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