Religion Dispatches
…my mom, sautéeing vegetables while watching the evening news; my dad, reading the newspaper and sipping coffee at the table; my boyfriend, practicing the piano. I could only see them in my mind’s eye and love them. With my phone and laptop stowed in my bag, I stood 8,000 miles away and felt broken and inadequate—but so present and so loved….
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…y from Victorian sentimentalism. Such angels are on sale at reduced price; cheap wares for cheap faith. It would be an error, however, to fully dismiss pop culture angels. Despite the fact that representations of angels in film and television, comics and music, paperback novels and posters, are filtered through market concerns, such pop culture can still speak to human meaning—and because of that they merit our attention. Besides, the bulk of art…
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…ion-entertainment complex will hear about them not at all, or as carefully minimized versions. If Roth’s Plot Against America is not a good literary map for our political present, that is partly because it glides over the important question of how individuals animated by political ideologies and movements have to activate the constitutional institutions and powers set out by the framers in order for them to work. But it is also because, while Dona…
Read More…the long-time music director at St. Victoria Catholic Church in Victoria, Minnesota, the minute he found out that Moore had married his partner the previous weekend. And while it’s true that Kansas City Bishop Robert Finn, who was found guilty of failing to report a priest who had pornographic pictures of young girls on his computer, is now under investigation by the Vatican, it took two years for that to happen. I guess in Vatican time that’s sw…
Read More…on a technicality. Under an agreement with prosecutors, the archdiocese of Newark, NJ, agreed to supervise him and banned him from contact with children, but appointed him as chaplain of a hospital without informing the hospital of his history. Fugee continued to have contact with children, including traveling with them on retreats, until last year when a local newspaper brought his activities to light and a public outcry forced his ouster. The bi…
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…guess. In any case, this forum wasn’t any better attended than the one in Detroit, and apparently even less appreciative of Trump’s presence: Others began to heckle the GOP presidential nominee. The pastor stepped in and silenced them too, saying that Trump “is our guest” who should be honored. But when Trump abruptly ended his speech, a few more in the crowd yelled at him as he walked off stage. One black woman, Reneta Richard, yelled at him “Wh…
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…tionalist, racist Yisrael Beiteinu party. (It’s now slated to merge with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, which was horrible enough before such a worrisome marriage.) Beinart is anathema to said American Jewish establishment, and he’s been slandered as anti-Israel. But as Shaul Magid noted in a review here, Beinart’s “critics, it appears, care far less about Israel than they do about what American Jews think about Israel.” The notion that Jews vote re…
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…cost of true discipleship. The price it was called upon to pay was all too cheap…We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale; we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition…Was there ever a more terrible and disastrous instance of Christianizing the world than this? It’s regrettable, I think, that “cheap grace” has turned into a kind of meme that Rod Dreher can toss into his debate with Andrew Sullivan without…
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…as a Master’s student at Fuller working the switchboard part-time, and the number one phone call that came through went something like this: “Can you connect me to C. Peter Wagner’s Church Growth Institute? I’d like to buy some materials.” No one was happier than I was when he retired from Fuller and moved to Colorado Springs! I felt like I worked at a catalog call-in center. Seriously. I would never have expected to be talking about Wagner in con…
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…results of a survey, conducted in 2020, that quantifies the violence epidemic. Based on a similar survey conducted in 2017 amongst United Methodists in the United States, it contributes to the “truth telling” element of a planned truth-and-reconciliation process on gender and sexual abuse in Episcopal spaces. And the truth is horrifying. Of the more than 2400 responses collected, 475 (20%) are from cisgender LGB Episcopalians. Nearly 40% of these…
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