Religion Dispatches
…wspaper during Matthew’s unsuccessful 2008 campaign for the Alabama Public Service Commission that she thought that while husbands and wives should talk about it, women should submit their vote to their husband, because to vote opposed would cancel each other’s vote out. Joyce informed me that Chancey also “spoke about her opposition to women’s voting in a film by the Gunn Brothers, winners of Vision Forum’s annual Christian film contest, The Mons…
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…ministry of women priests who would marry, absolve, and anoint them, is no service to them. Even as President Ronald Reagan challenged Michael Gorbachev to tear down the wall between East and West, the much-loved Pope John Paul II put every effort into freeing the Catholics of Eastern Europe from religious and political oppression. The new supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis I, has the opportunity to end another form of oppression…
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…been defended by Gaffney, who told the American Family Association’s news service in 2003 that Boykin “clearly put his finger on the truth when he said his God is bigger than the god of Islam. The administration, he says, should not reprimand Boykin for telling the truth.” Never reprimanded, Boykin retired from the military in 2007. He recently told James Dobson on his radio program, “Islam is not a religion and does not deserve First Amendment p…
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…ts own ATM machines (with prompts in ecclesiastical Latin), its own postal service; it even has its own gasoline station, set prettily next to an ornate Renaissance foundation. The Vatican also presides over its own courts and its own laws. Such “canon law,” as it is called, forms the very heart of Roman Catholic ethics, as it also informs the administrative handling of cases such as those initiated by these recent revelations of widespread priest…
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…of the pro-enslavement camp back then required duplicity, i.e, paying lip service to non-racialism and the enfranchisement of Black people while plotting their harm and repression just as the political survival of today’s conservatives requires plausible deniability regarding their racist remarks and policies. The Knights of the White Camelia, a Louisiana-based white supremacist secretive society made up of judges, teachers and white professional…
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…course, the final proposition is that the man was screened by the Security Service, amongst other security agencies, and only had a shoe to express his hatred of President Bush. The point is that this man was traumatized by the war. He wanted to express his anger. He had a shoe. He threw the shoe. Is this really so hard to understand? Do we as Americans treat having a shoe thrown at us as a sign of happiness or joy? We have become so conditioned t…
Read More…once said the only time Lutherans in Lake Wobegon lock their car doors in the church parking lot is in August. Otherwise they are likely to come out of Sunday service to find that someone has left a grocery bag full of zucchinis on the front car seat….
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…holders (from Mr. Jefferson on down) preyed sexually on the women in their service. Exploitation, yes; amalgamation, never. The voluntary (or involuntary) removal of the Native Americans and the colonization of freed Blacks on the west coast of Africa were the two strategies that eventually found the most favor among white leaders in the young Republic. The fact that many thousands of Native Americans were removed by one means or another has mainl…
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…) say the same of the American Bishops. 4) Few religious Americans support service refusals to gay and lesbian people on religious grounds… Nearly six in ten (58%) Americans—including 53% of Christians—oppose allowing a small business owner to refuse products or services to gay and lesbian people, even if doing so violates their religious beliefs. On the other hand, roughly one-third (36%) of the public support such a policy. Majorities of many re…
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…ny significant revisions to their procedures. As reported by Religion News Service, a draft proposal barely alters the Charter. According to Bishop Blase Cupich of Spokane, chair of the U.S. Bishops’ Committee on the Protection of Children and Young Adults, “the Charter is working.” In one sense, Cupich is right. Abuse allegations are down. But in another sense, the Charter is not working, because the decisions of some bishops continue to put chil…
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