Religion Dispatches
…. You are the dictatorship!)—today became—“Bergoglio. Basura. Vos sos la dictadura.” Habemus Papam Franciscum! Check back (or sign up for the newsletter) for a more detailed profile of the new pope. …
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…ut sex and sexuality. In order to do this, I needed people who absolutely knew their stuff, who could bring out the big guns both in terms of Jewish text and tradition, but also in terms of innovative thinking about gender, sex, and sexuality, who could marry a number of different lenses to create something new. It’s not a strictly academic work by any means; it’s meant to be accessible to people with all sorts of (and no) Jewish backgrounds—hence…
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…and England that eventually led to World War II, George Orwell reviewed a new edition of Mein Kampf in the New English Weekly (the same edition available at the Gutenberg link above). His words about Hitler—written five years before Animal Farm (1945) and nine years before Nineteen Eighty-four (1949)—are prescient for the American context today: Ever since [Hitler] came to power—till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking t…
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…such nonsense. But in studies like this one, Phrenology’s back again in a new form, implying this time that the size of the brain is any indicator of human intelligence. We’ve all been told countless times that the human brain is a highly redundant organ, and that each of us uses only a fraction of it in normal circumstances. Given that established scientific truism, it would be passing strange if brain size bore any relation to intelligence. An…
Read More…ion. Perhaps in the wake of the tragedy in Ferguson there will be a renewed vigor from progressive churches that will help repair old coalitions, build new ones, and tell a new story about who gets to speak “for religious people.”…
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….” One of the things we can do is call them out on that. You propose seven new deadly sins and seven new amazing graces—what are they? The core of my book is to move from this crime-based model of sin to a Christ-centered model of sin, and it’s not some kind of newfangled thing. As someone who teaches early church history, I’m trying to draw on this alternative strand of thinking about salvation and grace and God’s love and Christ infusing divinit…
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…teady stream of beliefs that arise around the world. Since the creation of new criteria for Marian apparitions in 1978, hundreds of sightings have been studied, and at least 12 were formally approved as of 2008—according to most numbers (although even a simple count of “official” sites is hard to obtain), Our Lady of Good Help is the 13th. Pope Benedict XVI recently called for more moderation in approving such sites, but any new regulations did no…
Read More…f the National Civic Council of Australia, described by the Northwest Star newspaper as “the leading Catholic-based lobby group campaigning against same-sex marriage in Australia, attended and gave his blessing to his daughter’s New Zealand marriage to another woman. Mr Westmore has railed against Australian and international moves toward same-sex marriage. In 2012 he told an audience at the National Marriage Day rally outside Federal Parliament:…
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…onality, we are fated to despair. We know full well the makings of genuine newness are not included among these present pieces. And short of genuine newness life becomes a dissatisfied coping, a grudging trust, and a managing that dares never ask too much. (The Prophetic Imagination, p. 63) This is what Obama seems to have been shooting for—and failed to achieve. Where his rhetoric soared on the campaign trail, in the State of the Union it seemed…
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…sion was later ruled moot because HHS had changed its policy and did not renew the USCCB’s contract (provoking the Republican accusations of anti-Catholic bias), the ACLU maintains the legal reasoning still applies. If it does, the ACLU argues, the bishops’ claims that the new Prison Rape Elimination Act regulations violate RFRA would not prevail, since RFRA cannot trump the Constitution. “It’s a stretch to argue, as they do, that they are entitle…
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