Why Serra Should Not Be a Saint
…possibility of our ever fully grasping and narrating the mission period. Photo of a statue of Junipero Serra (California I-280, between SF and San Jose) courtesy Steve Boland via Flickr/Creative Commons….
Read More…possibility of our ever fully grasping and narrating the mission period. Photo of a statue of Junipero Serra (California I-280, between SF and San Jose) courtesy Steve Boland via Flickr/Creative Commons….
Read More…to continue to shrink into the insularity and disorganization that caused the Philadelphia Archdiocese to decline so precipitously? It remains to be seen. Meanwhile, faithful 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…
Read More…inary staff from among the higher ups in the dioceses of San Francisco and San Jose, including Jesuit Fr. John Piderit as the seminary’s vice president for administration. Piderit is the former president of Loyola University in Chicago, and in 2000, he stepped down from that position after budget crises at Loyola brought the university nearly to the breaking point and calls for his removal were heard from faculty, staff and students. As professor…
Read More…ne for committing a misdemeanor. In order to get this proposal on the 2011 San Francisco city ballot, Schofield has to collect over seven thousand signatures—and thus far his campaign is not going very well. Quite to the contrary, the idea has caused a backlash, and not only in the American Jewish Community. The organized Jewish community in both California and throughout the U.S. rallied to condemn the proposed ban. Within a few days of Schofield…
Read More…, not the fourth century … You’re not free to practice your religion in my airline seat.’ ‘This is male entitlement .. the height of male arrogance.’ One comment referred to this as a ‘back of the bus’ issue; as in, women being asked to move in such circumstances was tantamount to assigning them a lesser status as citizens and lower dignity as human beings. Other readers proposed that airlines set aside special seating for men requiring such accom…
Read MoreIf you haven’t read it already, journalist Jose Antonio Vargas’ extraordinary story of his life as an undocumented immigrant in the United States will move you to tears — unless, that is, you have ice water running through your veins. You must read it; it’s quite possibly the most important and telling thing you will read about what America is in a long time. I just saw Vargas this past weekend at the Netroots Nation conference in Minneapolis. He…
Read More…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…
Read More…of a towering palm tree was a group of actual Tibetan Buddhist monks from San Jose. “The Dalai Lama always says don’t be violent,” said monk Sangyal Dhondub through a Tibetan interpreter. But those protesting Chinese treatment of Tibetans must not be judged too harshly, he continued, even if they disrupt Olympic activities: “As human beings, they cannot control their emotions.” “I’m in support of protest happening here, so people know that Tibeta…
Read More…er from playing a role in national elections scheduled for next year. Aung San Suu Kyi is the daughter of Burma’s national martyr and founder of the armed forces, Aung San, who was assassinated on the eve of his ascension to prime minister of an independent Burma. For much of her adult life, Aung San Suu Kyi lived and studied at Oxford University, where she raised a family. She entered politics in 1988, during the course of a popular uprising that…
Read MoreAdam 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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