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Picasso’s Sacred Monster Eats Chicago: A Mystery Solved?

By Jeremy Biles

…rants, concerts, and museums—and thronging to gaze at public art. Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, the reflective bean-shaped orb in the art-filled Millennium Park, is perhaps the most popular piece on view, but Chicago also boasts pieces by Jean Dubuffet, Marc Chagall, Alexander Calder, and Joan Miró. Most recently, Seward Johnson’s enormous (and widely maligned) sculpture of Marilyn Monroe in her famous Seven Year Itch pose has taken up temporary resi…

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

By Anthea Butler

…nd open” to the public on the conference website. As a result, some hotel rooms are being cancelled, people are angry, and shopkeepers are worried. It’s not the Philadelphia nativist riots of 1844, but hey… Don’t worry, if you’re coming to Philly and can’t get a ticket, this picture from my friends at Billy Penn shows just how close you can get to the altar—that dot in the distance in the background is where the altar will be. Photo by Anna Orso,…

The Man in the Red Dress: My Unlikely Friendship with Cardinal Francis George

By Cathleen Falsani

…. That is a man secure in his mortality, I thought as I craned my neck to look for the flight attendant refilling wine glasses. I recalled that unflinching newspaper when I learned Cardinal George had died last week after a lengthy battle with cancer, a disease he’d beaten twice before in the years since I left Chicago and the newspaper job that often put me in his company—whether I’d been invited or not. Cardinal George (or “Frannie G,” as some o…

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

By Eboo Patel

…iarchal oppression? The Matter of Identity I have found it interesting to look at this situation in light of the influential identity politics formulation that ‘the personal is political’. First advanced by women in the feminist movement, it now serves as a pretty good one-line definition of cultural progressivism more broadly. I have heard it referenced in arguments for everything from Ethnic Studies departments to LGBT safe spaces. That the pers…

Exclusive: Why Did Chicago Public Schools Just Quietly Drop Transcendental Meditation?

By Aryeh Siegel

…artnered with the University of Chicago’s Urban Labs and Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to test whether Transcendental Meditation (TM) could reduce crime and improve school performance. Two thousand students in five high schools located in high crime Chicago neighborhoods participated in the $3 million study through its “Quiet Time” (QT) program. Earlier this month, in response to a direct email inquiry, RD was notified by a CPS official that “CPS i…

Archbishop of Chicago Accuses Emanuel of McCarthyism Over Chick-fil-A

By Sarah Posner

…e such a move is, if I can borrow a phrase, “un-Chicagoan.” That from the good Cardinal who once said, “You don’t want the gay liberation movement to morph into something like the Ku Klux Klan, demonstrating in the streets against Catholicism.” Cardinal George subsequently apologized for that remark, but only because it hurt gay and lesbian people he knows, not because it suggested infringing on anyone’s First Amendment rights. He apologized under…

Atheist Nazis? The Pope’s Cheap Atonement

By Susannah Heschel

…nedict 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 Kasper, on the eve of the Pope’s visit, called Britain a third-world country full of atheists, one wonders if the Vatican is displacing Nazism or anticipating a new ou…

Workers Once Forced the Social Gospel Into Churches—Can It Happen Again?

By Eric C. Miller

…t has less often been attributed to organized labor. In his excellent new book, Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago, Valparaiso University historian Heath W. Carter credits working people with the advocacy and gradual success of the social justice faith. When RD’s Eric C. Miller spoke with Carter about his project, he had in mind a number of parallels between the late 1800s and the early 2000s. Then as now, in…

Glenn Beck’s Cheap Grace

By Karyn Carlo

…rom their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; He has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” This same Jesus tells us in Matthew 19:24 that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” Similarly, the early Christian community is described in Acts 4:34-35 like this: “There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold th…

The Rise and Fall of an American Gang: Religion as Camouflage?

By Spencer Dew

…t’s not a question that gets answered in this fascinating but frustrating book, a chronicle of the shifting organization that, helmed by Jeff Fort (later Prince Malik) cornered a sizeable chunk of the Chicago heroin market, provided protection for Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson, defrauded the government on funding for Great Society social programs, was identified with praise by Louis Farrakhan as the Nation of Islam’s “Angels of Death,” and…