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When Welcoming the Stranger Was Not Just a Religious Value

By Melissa Borja

…epting only Christians, creating a national database to track Muslims, and using the National Guard to round up Syrian refugees. The Thanksgiving celebration proposed by Carter, Hesburgh, and Mandelbaum thirty-six years ago rings familiar to us today, with its calls for interfaith compassion. Yet that moment of a united response to suffering is also so far away. Religious communities have welcomed refugees with open arms, but whether or not govern…

Will “Religious Freedom” Be the Issue That Finally Unites the Religious Right?

By Eric C. Miller

…atched Vatican II closely, appreciating some of the reforms but ultimately using the council to affirm their own exclusive possessions of truth. Mormons viewed Vatican II skeptically. They praised the Catholic Church’s new support for religious freedom. But LDS leaders argued that whatever reforms Vatican II made could never change the fact that it was the Catholic Church’s apostasy from true Christianity that had ultimately led to the need for Jo…

Pope Francis Dismisses Condoms in AIDS Fight

By Patricia Miller

…holics Use Condoms” World AIDS Day campaign, Kenyan Archbishop Peter Kairo said, “As the Catholic Church we are not promoting use of condoms. I don’t agree with the advertisements on the billboards and newspapers that say Catholics believe in sex which is sacred and that they believe in using condoms.” “The hierarchy’s ill informed war against condoms goes on,” said O’Brien, who noted that these same bishops “are very often involved in the adminis…

Is It the Job of Religion Journalists to Define “Religion”?

By Ann Taves

…portfolio. The answer strikes me as quite obvious—even if this study is focusing on organizations that are avowedly secular, the authors are Harvard Divinity School students preparing for ministry to non-religious millennials. Oppenheimer could easily argue that the idea of ministry is changing rather dramatically as more people identify as “non-religious” and this phenomena bears investigation. Damon Linker, by way of contrast, wrote an “op-ed” p…

The Oil Spill and “Real Deathliness”

By Daniel Schultz

…t we have suppressed this truth, engaged in denial and cover-up. Refusing to live a life of gratitude, refusing to live a life of thanks to the God who called forth such a rich creation, refusing to honor this Creator God, and embracing a culture of entitlement and ingratitude, we abandoned the God of light and embraced the dark. Really, read the whole thing. It names the death hovering over our sh…

Reporting from Paris During COP21: A Haunted Sabbath

By Donna Schaper

…d meal I’ve had in France. It was served 45 minutes after being ordered, causing us to miss all but the final “Alleluia” of Handel’s Messiah, back at the American Cathedral. There the chorus master did something that was just right. He allowed the packed house to sing the Alleluia chorus twice. Once for good measure and twice in this year of climate and terror, where we don’t know which is worse, and we know both are bad. “King of kings and Lord o…

A Moral Galaxy: War and Suffering in “Star Wars: The Old Republic”

By Robert M. Geraci and Nat Recine

…ers were discordant. It’s an interesting game, and I would almost advocate using it for educational purposes in high school.” If each player can acquire an embodied, lived experience of cultural ideals through play, then the specific ways of thinking and acting that games engage are of public significance. One player spoke to this when he said: “whenever I do evil things in the game, I feel almost like I’ve actually done evil things, so I keep tha…

A Third Reconstruction? Rev. William Barber Lifts the Trumpet

By Peter Laarman

…publicans could lock up the South by appealing to old racial fears without using race-specific language. Rather than saying “segregation,” they started talking about “entitlement programs,” “busing” and “law and order.” Divide-and-conquer politics broke up the coalitions of the Second Reconstruction and so-called progressives have accepted this as a given. Yes, San Bernadino was terrorism. So was Mother Emmanuel AME. So are the drone attacks on ci…

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Blames Gays For ISIS; ‘Christian Nationalist’ Sworn In As Guatemala’s President; Vatican Resists Civil Unions in Italy; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…her things, students’ right to self-identify their gender and be addressed using their preferred pronouns. The Alberta Catholic School Trustees’ Association released a statement this week reaffirming “that all Catholic schools in Alberta have been and will continue to be inclusive, welcome, safe and caring environments,” and praising anti-bullying policies, but also reaffirming “the responsibility and the role of the Alberta Catholic Bishops to pr…

The Sex Scandal Following Whole Foods’ Guru

By Michael Schulson

…nes, Starbucks, and, somewhat mysteriously, Amazon.com, which is known for using underpaid temp-style labor in its warehouses and allegedly mistreating employees at its home offices. You don’t have to be a Marxist to question whether these institutions are “fulfilling every major value of the great spiritual traditions.” At the very least, that sentiment might seem alien to wage laborers, or to anyone who enjoys work but doesn’t think of it in qui…