Religion Dispatches
…always a threat to individual achievement and to competition: to what made American great, in other words. God surely smiled upon the old laissez faire American Way—but God cannot be pleased by our drift into Big Government and a nanny state. We need to restore America’s greatness, blah-di-blah-blah-blah. It is pure folly to imagine that conservatives, and especially religious conservatives, will be prepared to surrender their viewpoint based on…
Read More…changed their position: USCCB general counsel Anthony Picarello tells USA Today: That means removing the provision from the health care law altogether, he said, not simply changing it for Catholic employers and their insurers. He cited the problem that would create for “good Catholic business people who can’t in good conscience cooperate with this.” If I quit this job and opened a Taco Bell, I’d be covered by the mandate,’ Picarello said. 3. The…
Read More…e president of the convention—“the highest position yet held by an African-American” in the denomination, the New York Times notes. Fred Luter Jr. pastors a largely black church in New Orleans and is apparently an “overwhelming favorite to be elected president at the assembly next year.” This is great news for the Southern Baptists, who have been predominantly, if not exclusively, white since the denomination’s founding. One might ask why it took…
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…ith campaign priorities. (Clayton Christensen, another Harvard-affiliated, business world-molded Mormon leader has emerged lately as a Romney media surrogate.) Romney’s reticence can be understood as a feature of the late twentieth century LDS corporate culture that formed and rewarded him. Late twentieth century corporate LDS Church culture strongly emphasized disciplined messaging (also known as “correlation”) as well as individual obedience and…
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…eral women’s religious communities are doing together to aid newly arrived Americans—immigrants. In Milwaukee, they ate at St. Ben’s meal program, meeting with people who are marginalized and those who dedicate their lives to help them. In Chicago, they visited Mercy Housing, where Mercy Sisters and collaborators “develop, finance and operate affordable, program-enriched housing communities for families, seniors, and people with special needs.” No…
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…ld Church of God’s Power, proclaims himself), I momentarily implored God for a miracle for my mother, who six months ago survived the latest in a harrowing series of medical ordeals. With that little bit of prayerful business out of the way, I turned from the ecstatic mob of Santiago-rushing crentes and walked down the darkened block, gripping my scuffed iPhone and returning to my real life, a reality somehow made newer….
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…ore culturally plausible, both within the conservative Christian world and American culture at large. For their first decades, ex-gay ministries were largely marginal in the evangelical world, toiling in a ministry backwater with a suspect group of people. Occasionally the healed homosexual made for good Christian television, highlighting God’s healing power for those who believed, but defections (most notably Bussee’s) and scandals kept ministrie…
Read More…is twin sister. The Blood of the Walsungs is a nasty, fascinating piece of business. (I’d put it in the same category as T.S. Eliot’s “Burbank with a Beidecker, Bleistein with a Cigar”—masterworks of hateful snobbery.) But in its time, Mann’s theme was not so unusual. For German-speaking intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century, the self-lacerating tendencies of assimilated Jews (real or imagined) was a serious topic of discussion,…
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…re, but to expand Planned Parenthood’s abortion empire across the backs of American taxpayers and people of conscience—and at the expense of our religious freedoms. In light of today’s ruling, Americans will greet Independence Day with prayer, sacrifice, and renewed energy to continue our opposition to this mandate. We must also recommit ourselves to restoring full constitutional protections of Life and Liberty to the most vulnerable in our societ…
Read More…ted that perhaps it was time for the Catholics to get out of the education business if they could not fully respect academic freedom. He noted that in the old days, monks served as the original firemen. When a fire happened, the monastery bell rang and they all rushed off to the bucket brigade. This was a religious act. However, when the state and the community took up fire fighting, the monks abandoned the bucket brigade. Perhaps Dan and Peter ha…
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