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…
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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…
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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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…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…a 30-year-old conservative radio and television commentator with more microphone than sense. As part of a four-segment series on Mormonism, Ferguson developed a rambling, virtually content-free six-minute segment featuring man-on-the street interviews with local Memphis residents about, well, how very “fruity” Mormonism is. (There are 45,000 Mormons in Tennessee, about .7% of the population. Mormons left the state en masse in the 1880s due to anti…
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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…
Read More…le are working together to digitize the Dead Sea Scrolls and make them available to the public. Finally, did the Berenstain Bears become practicing Christians? *This post has been corrected. The church is located in Memphis, Michigan, not Memphis, Tennessee. The First Baptist Church of Memphis (Tennessee), by all appearances, promotes a positive engagement with community, like interfaith dialogue. RD regrets the error….
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…way from the hard work of repentance, who tickle our ears with promises of cheap grace, and offer a vision of the cross of Jesus that has nothing to say to the crosses, and lynching trees, of history. But, if we do, we will be settling for the gospel of Caesar, not the good news of Jesus Christ. Perhaps it is time to put down the chalk, stop drawing pyrotechnical conspiracy theories that play into our worst fears and listen, instead, for the diffi…
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…We have an unprecedented access to cheap goods, yet we must recognize that cheap goods are cheaply made. I am not speaking of quality, I am speaking of cheap labor. We must recognize that through the act of shopping, whether it is for an article of clothing, a toy, a pint of strawberries, or even our morning cup of coffee, we participate in a global economy that values profit over people. Disposable goods are made by disposable people, faceless in…
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