Religion Dispatches
…e spirits from the past, haunting the living in present times of war, economic turmoil, and environmental crisis. A stretch, you say? Unnecessarily morose, over-determined, overly-brooding commentary that profanes the sacrality of children’s fun and games, you think? Historians are not usually the life of the party, but history does shed light in the darkness, and the history of Halloween, as most readers here know, is primarily about collapsing t…
Read More…the woman in consultation with her doctor, I believe we need to reduce the number of abortions in America. I believe government has the responsibility to regulate in this area and I support parental consent and notification requirements and I oppose partial birth abortion. I also believe there are people of good will on both sides of the issue and we ought to work together to support and promote adoption as an alternative to abortion. Apart from t…
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…ald Reagan, comes from a letter he wrote on the ship Arbella just before coming ashore in New England. This letter was not a document touting the religious freedom and democracy the new colony would soon enjoy, but a description of the Puritans’ covenantal obligations to God and the wrath they could expect from this God if they disobeyed his strict and holy will. Moore worships the same God. He was removed from the Alabama bench twice during his c…
Read More…and provide trauma relief and grief counseling to the victims and their families.” Upon further examination, whatever genuine relief they might provide appears to be offset by their efforts to promote their religious beliefs. For example, during my stint volunteering at Ground Zero after the September 11 attacks, I witnessed the Scientologists’ volunteer ministers in action. Once some semblance of order was restored after a few weeks, they were o…
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…longstanding role as a source for sacred life: crucial ingredients in the mix of dynamic, sometimes politically powerful, religious cultures. I may be wrong, but it is highly unlikely Pew or any other foundation will support a survey about the religious role of music in everyday life. Should that time come it isn’t difficult to consider other potential avenues for investigation when the conventional options are put aside and the rise of no religi…
Read More…or Anne Gudenkauf. Among other things, Schumacher-Matos read an article by Mimi Swartz and published in the New York Times Magazine about same-sex attracted religious people who accept being same-sex attracted but do not identify as gay. I was quoted extensively in that piece and one of my former clients was interviewed for it. Here is what Schumacher-Matos surmises: In 2009, a task force of the American Psychological Association came out clearly…
Read More…r Francis pick, Bridgeport, CT, Bishop Frank Caggiano, for chair of the Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth, which is responsible for promoting the church’s teaching regarding hot-button issues like family and contraception (or the lack thereof). Msgr. J. Brian Bransfield was elected as the conference’s new general secretary. NCR’s Winters, who has been an outspoken critic of the increasingly culture-warrior posture of the USCCB st…
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…conflicted devout. Just ten years ago this wasn’t so. The George W. Bush administration, in which millennials came of age, was reigned over by a simple, angry deity who made one-dimensional characterizations of God more readily available than complex ones. The God-Rock genre had a decent run in the 1990s and early aughts, but its contents lacked theological rigor. More wholesome bands like Jars of Clay essentially sang praise anthems while an angs…
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…take. And only if the beth din deems the allegation to be true will the family be permitted to go to the authorities. Ocean County Prosecutor Marlene Lynch Ford, who brought the case against Yosef Kolko, is concerned that such actions limit a prosecutor’s ability to secure a conviction. “By having a diversion to a different type of tribunal, no matter how well intentioned the people involved are, it ultimately makes the job of getting a criminal…
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…anks to their enormous popularity, Luce’s publications had their share of imitators. None came close to testing the dominance of Time until one would-be rival was bought by the Washington Post Company in 1961. Newsweek had been founded by an ex-Time staffer almost thirty years before, and perhaps as a filial rejection of a former employer’s concerns, in the beginning Newsweek published very little about religion generally, and less about Catholics…
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