Religion Dispatches
…ring this spirit of love and acceptance back to their home congregations.” This summer, Mormons are organizing to walk in eight additional Pride parades in Seattle, Portland, Boise, Cleveland, San Diego, Washington, D.C., and New York City. ….
Read More…ed on by three nuns who live in a nearby coach house—very Downton Abbey. • Seattle Archbishop James Sartain, who is currently in charge of making sure that the naughty nuns of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious don’t spend too much time worrying about social justice issues, lives alone in a charming three-story brick Victorian home valued at $3.84 million. • Baltimore Archbishop William Lori, head of the bishop’s Committee on Religious L…
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…, Florida, was made up of 825 nuns and only three priests, one of whom was Seattle’s Archbishop J. Peter Sartain—the official charged by the Vatican with overseeing the LCWR following last year’s harsh assessment of American nuns. The Vatican came down hard on American sisters last year, admonishing them for doing too much “social justice” work, disagreeing with Church teaching on gay people, and propagating “radical feminist themes.” Not surpris…
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…in overt ways. Cohocton is a small town, with a population in 2009 of about 800 people. It is in upstate New York. It is not my small town, nor is it likely yours; and yet each of these places is someone’s neighborhood. This time, it is only an hour away for me. Picketing as “The Workingman’s Means of Communication” On March 2, 2011, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in response to a series of prior decisions around Westboro Baptist Church’s pi…
Read More…though this, the men would hover around the tent entries, send notes, make phone calls, actually get their phone cords recharged, and send food and drink through every possible opening in the tent. As far as I could tell, it was always the men hanging around our tent and not the women hanging around the men’s tent. Pretty funny if you think about it. They were like lost puppies without their women. Yet patriarchy would have us think they are the m…
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…destined for a higher calling. Meanwhile, Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle was a popular and liberal cleric who ran afoul of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, then head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Much like the US nuns who are being investigated now, Hunthausen was the subject of an Apostolic Visitation because he was supportive of civil and religious rights for women and LGBTQ people. The result was that Wuerl was named as…
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…come close. Perhaps the most successful music program was at Mars Hill in Seattle. In her essay “Heaven, Hell, and Hipsters” from Ecclesial Practices ethnomusicologist Maren Haynes writes of their well-wrought strategy of borrowing from Seattle’s burgeoning music scene. “Rather than trying to promote a foreign ritual mechanism,” Haynes says, “Mars Hill’s worship directors reinterpret the ritual environment of a concert, packaging it instead as a…
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…, mental and emotional safety.” Epperson says pacifism can amount to complicity: “Letting someone do violence to you is also not a non-violent approach.” Their emphasis on proportionality differs from the absolutist stance of Buddhist texts. But Gilad Yakil, a former Israeli Defense Forces soldier now acting as coordinator at a Tibetan retreat center in Bodh Gaya, India, says the teachings are ideals, not strict rules. “There are amazing instances…
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After leading his team to victory over the Seattle Seahawks last Sunday, Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers told reporters that God “was a Packers fan tonight”—a retort to Russell Wilson’s comment that God had “set up” the Seahawks’ win over the Packers in the NFC Championship game nine months ago. The back-and-forth (if one that allows nine months to respond can rightly use the term) elicits eye-rolling from most serious sports fans and…
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…ese good Jesus people didn’t just meet to pray away unionism; one of their number, a certain Arthur Langlie, went on to use state power to smash unions as mayor of Seattle and then governor of Washington State, declaring at the outset of his rise to power: “I am ready to let God use me!” From the beginning, in other words, the manly network that would become The Family evinced a very high comfort level with violence and brutality. At another impor…
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