Religion Dispatches
…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 didn’t get one, but my citizen journalist dues are current. Stay tuned….
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…e 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 cultural progressivism. The rancor expressed towards Orthodox Jews on the Times website is one example of this. The preferred identities of cultural progressivism are race, gender and sexuality. There are good reasons that these identities are favored. Each category incl…
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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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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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…ommodations—like a parking lot. It might look to Lourdes to improve its website: on the official site for the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, visitor FAQs tell you how to get to Lourdes, how to get your hands on some holy water from the grotto, and how to leave an ex-voto offering (look elsewhere for hotel bookings—there are dozens of hotels in Lourdes, all advertising their proximity in meters and yards to the grotto). If you can’t travel, stay…
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…’t see his site as a true contribution to the sex-positive Christian movement. Restoring Christian Sexuality is just another porn site, parading in its Sunday best….
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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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…’s reputation for fierce honesty in its church coverage helped bolster the site, and Allen’s decades of experience, coupled with the skill of its writing staff, made the site an important voice. In the small hive that is Catholic journalism, Crux had a lot of buzz. What it did not have was a lot of money. The Globe’s strategy was to hopefully attract what editor Brian McGrory described as “big-ticket, Catholic-based advertisers.” But those adverti…
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…e success either. The opening weekend saw sales of more than $6 million in tickets. That’s the kind of number that will inspire others to try and figure out the formula for the faith-and-family blockbuster. Yet, with the cost of the film reportedly exceeding $30 million, it’s an open question whether or not the Left Behind reboot will get a second installment. The marketing problem of evangelical movies is still, stubbornly, a problem. The general…
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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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