Religion Dispatches
…ume that reads like Vatican officials wrote it. Perhaps they did. Although what is more disturbing is that the Vatican has set women up against one another. Conservative women religious collaborated on the Apostolic Visitation and will be appointed to the Archbishop Delegate’s Advisory Team. The effort to rein in LCWR is meant as much to scare the rest of us into line as to corral the nuns. I can say with confidence that it won’t work. Roman Catholi…
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…within evangelicalism, like the prominent Texas Republican, David Barton, promote the idea that America is slouching toward Gomorrah. America is God’s chosen republic, Barton asserts: the nation has been an explicitly Christian country from its earliest days and needs to reverse its sinful migration away from its biblical roots. Professional historians, by contrast (including leading evangelicals like Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, and George Marsden)…
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…ive American Jews and conservative American evangelicals as a Bible story that, by Netanyahu’s reading, depicts Iranians as eternal enemies. And I guess Netanyahu, like any politician, hates to miss an opportunity to reach his base. (In case word of his remarks to Obama didn’t reach them, Netanyahu mentioned Esther in his AIPAC speech last night, calling it the story of a “Persian anti-Semite [who] tried to annihilate the Jewish people.”) The geni…
Read More…tions, a major increase from the 19 percent of congregations in 2006-2007 that allowed such opportunities.” The litany of denominations that have changed their stance toward LGBT people, not just in the pews, but in leadership roles like pastor, deacon or elder, would have blown the minds of those holding church in the bar all those years ago. Could they even imagined the doors and pulpits of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America welcoming th…
Read More…born citizen” is all over the place. John Lofton, ITOC spokesperson and a promoter of Titus’ theory, reiterated to me today that in their view, the birth certificate doesn’t matter at all. Lofton, who has been critical of WND for emphasizing the birth certificate issue, seemed pleased that the “natural born citizen” theory figured so prominently in Corsi’s new book. Corsi doesn’t cite Titus, but Titus has been pushing this harebrained business fo…
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…upy protests, “I think about that a lot,” said Merritt. “I think: exactly what happened? What happened? Why aren’t there 50 clergy?” That could be, of course, a product of lack of information, an aversion to the style of the Occupy protests, an absence of resources, or many other factors. Merritt acknowledged that clergy have far more administrative demands on them than they did 40 or 50 years ago, constraining their ability to get involved in pol…
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…operly as he had saved as much life as was possible. Fr. Haring asked: by what thinking could the fetus have such a right to life that it could kill both itself and the woman by exercising it? Such rights, he said, do not exist. Alicja Tysiac, in 2000, was advised that her pregnancy, if it went to term, would cause blindness. She was forbidden to abort and lost nearly all her eyesight. The European Court of Human Rights ruled in her favor saying s…
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…veral times. I thought all Christians did that sort of thing. Finding out that I was wrong about that, including the fact that there were Christians who supported capital punishment [see related blog post: “Does Religion Justify the Murder of Troy Davis?” —ed.], prompted all sorts of questions for me. Second, the historic jail in downtown Pittsburgh. On a tour of the facility, I was told that the jail was modeled on earlier Pennsylvania penal inst…
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…s piece in the NY Times, “The Changing Face of the Burning Man Festival,” that ran on Burning Man’s opening day. It turns out that the Burning Man organization will be shifting from a for-profit company to a nonprofit. How much will the payout be to the six owners? Burners want to know. Those who gripe about the degeneration of Burning Man into a consumer event could add this sale to a long list of complaints: rules and more rules, opaque finances…
Read More…m away from God. The UCC way of thinking about it, rightly or wrongly, is that that would be wrong. Better to have them ditch the “Father” than to exclude them from the faith. Other churches have different views on these questions. Orthodox Christians and many Catholics would look at that situation and ask “If you can’t all agree that God is Father, how can you say that you share the same faith?” It’s not easy, is the short answer. Because I don’t…
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