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

…milies and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Both have managed to make both Catholics and non-Catholics so angry that many will certainly stay away. What happened? Why has the WMOF and the Archdiocese mangled the messaging of what should be a feel-good, uplifting papal visit? Simple: the Archdiocese is still in disarray from the administrations of Cardinals Rigali and Bevilacqua. Pope Benedict XXVI knew exactly what he was doing when he announced i…

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

…held a black-only meeting to discuss racism (in collaboration with the African-American principal of the school), particular identities were marked as not-invited—namely, white, Asian, Latino, and other non-black students at the high school. Many cultural progressives supported the meeting, claiming that power issues in the broader culture and the long history of oppression of African Americans justified creating this protected space. There is a p…

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

…mise. The Federalist Society is pre-political (but definitely not nonpolitical) because the purpose of the organization is to nourish and establish within law students, in the infancy of their professional careers, the intellectual preconditions for future political and legal activity premised firmly on these “civilizational” values. What we discover beneath the floorboards, then, are the beams and joists of a systematic moral philosophy and theol…

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Atheist Nazis? The Pope’s Cheap Atonement

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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Glenn Beck’s Cheap Grace

…race and salvation, as Beck tries to do but, again, that would not be biblical. Both John the Baptist and Jesus made the call to repentance from both personal and social sin, a central part of their preaching. Without this repentance, there is no grace and no salvation. Beck then goes on to equate Cone’s black theology with Marxism. Here he is wildly off base and his unfortunate tendency to take everything he doesn’t like, slap it on to his chalkb…

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

…ports the results to the bishop, who might consult other prelates or the local Cardinal, or “just ask around,” and then makes the call about an apparition’s authenticity. “Basically,” admitted the diocese’s representative, they usually ignore the whole thing. “Let it be,” he added, with no apparent irony. By comparison, bishops who enthusiastically support Marian apparitions or manifestations these days, like the former Bishop of Civitavecchia nea…

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A Meditation on Shopping and Desire

…in his long and arduous path to Christianity. As I searched for a theological category to come to terms with our context, the word concupiscence leapt out at me. A theme that emerges in Augustine’s corpus is how we have misguided desire, or lust and passion, in relation to the material world and other human beings. How does Augustine define lust and passion? He often describes it as concupiscence: strong desire, especially sexual, that sometimes…

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Are Evangelical Films Destined to Leave Secular Audiences Behind?

…should be. This, it would seem, is the site of a deep division within American evangelicalism. There’s a serious difference of opinion over what values should be paramount in making movies. Left Behind could have been the vehicle for showing how this problem could be solved, but it didn’t work. The fight that Lalonde had with authors of the book and that Lalonde had with fans of the movies who were anxious about the remake will continue. And it do…

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The Faith that Faith Produced

…slims have gone through a lot over the last few decades. We were never the caricature Islamophobes made us out to be (our earliest heroes include Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Malcolm X), but we’ve had real problems with narrow-mindedness, institutional immaturity, misogyny, and religious illiteracy—these persist in places, but I think not like they did before.  And that’s because American Muslims were able to separate Islam from its prac…

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Corporations Have Consciences and Contraceptives Are Cheap: Hobby Lobby at the Supreme Court

…an exemption from covering ella, Plan B, and IUDs, claiming that they may cause an abortion. Scalia declared these methods “not terribly expensive.” But Verilla pointed out that the IUD, one of the most effective methods of birth control, is also one of the most expensive. (They can cost as much as $1,000.) As expected, the Court did not question in any depth the companies’ claim that these methods are abortifacients. But in response to a hypothe…

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