Religion Dispatches
…t 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 didn’t get one, but my citizen journalist dues are current. Stay tuned….
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…ed to accommodate others. I have seen people give up their aisle seat to a senior citizen and take his middle. I have watched passengers with first class seats hand their tickets to uniformed veterans and sit in economy. Several times I have witnessed people move further back to allow a mother to sit next to her children. All of these required not only the hassle of moving, but also the discomfort of a worse seat. Sometimes the person with the bet…
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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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…itutional rights.” There are, as with most of Reed’s biblical analogies, a number of basic textual and historical problems here. To scratch the surface: Roman citizenship would have been rare among the earliest followers of Christ; Paul probably was not a citizen himself (this detail appears in the romanticizing later narrative of Acts of the Apostles, but not in Paul’s own letters); and, the “emperor’s household” in Philippians was a reference to…
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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…,” is ineligible to be president because he didn’t have two loyal American citizens as parents. Titus claims that the Founders, in putting the “natural born citizen” requirement in Article II of the Constitution, meant to ensure that presidents are “singularly loyal to the Constitution.” That concept, he insists (without proof), comes from Deuteromony 17. I’d like to tell you that was satire, but no. I did a quick search of Corsi’s book on Amazon,…
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…enough of us stood up in its defense. This was the backdrop to my reading Citizen Wealth: Winning the Campaign to Save Working Families by Wade Rathke, the 40-year organizing veteran and founder of ACORN. Not surprisingly, the book is easy to read and totally engaging. It is written by an organizer. He tells stories. He inspires us. He challenges us. People of faith are deeply concerned about poverty, hunger and homelessness. We set up soup kitch…
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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…
Read More…: Cruz isn’t worried that his birth certificate will be a problem. Though he was born in Canada, he and his advisers are confident that they could win any legal battle over his eligibility. Cruz’s mother was a U.S. citizen when he was born, and he considers himself to be a natural-born citizen. Get it? Barack Obama, while actually born in the United States, is not a natural born citizen, a term used by conspiratorial conservatives who claim that t…
Read More…,” is ineligible to be president because he didn’t have two loyal American citizens as parents. Titus claims that the Founders, in putting the “natural born citizen” requirement in Article II of the Constitution, meant to ensure that presidents are “singularly loyal to the Constitution.” That concept, he insists (without proof), comes from Deuteromony 17: Deuteronomy 17 says you shall not take a king from anyone other than from your brethren. In o…
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