Religion Dispatches
…ing a population larger than the 25 smallest states combined… One in eight Americans is poor. One child in six is poor. … From 2000 to 2007, the number of children living in poverty increased by 15 percent… In 2007, the richest 20 percent of Americans had over 50 percent of the nation’s income, while the poorest 20 percent had only 3.4 percent.” In a piece titled “Fighting Poverty With Faith,” Steeland and Nordengren recently reported that “the ‘F…
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…o bishops were present, along with some twenty priests and a roughly equal number of religious brothers and sisters. Several hundred people packed the pews and dozens more squeezed into the space in the back of the church, with news crews roving the aisles. Before the opening procession, the emcee led us in the Angelus prayer. The Mass then opened with a mournful-sounding dirge in Tagalog, “Buksan Ang Aming Puso” (“Open Our Hearts”). The readings…
Read More…aception. So is the salient difference the size of the list? Is there some number of things-this-paper-can-be-used-for that puts the employer at a safe moral distance from the act, where previously they had been complicit? If so, what’s the number? How long does the list of possible uses have to be to assuage the employer’s conscience enough to let the employees use their compensation for things the employer finds morally repugnant? See, here’s th…
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…cial gospelers did in making their religious convictions a public force in American politics. By the same token, when one looks at the number of visionary leaders influenced by social gospelers like Walter Rauschenbusch—such as Martin Luther King Jr.—it would be a gross injustice to the movement’s legacy to say that it failed. Rauschenbusch’s vision was of a faith-based movement that required not just a political but a spiritual response. My hope…
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…o-Simple Majority,” which documents a school board dispute in East Ramapo, New York. This stunning account of a political war between an Orthodox Jewish community and their Latino and African-American neighbors is a case study in religious pluralism (or the impossibility thereof). Our second category winner is the most popular podcast in history, the This American Life spin-off Serial, which just wrapped up its first season. Over twelve episodes S…
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…xplore the issues that divide their congregations and communities. After a number of clichés are deployed to describe the deep divisions in US culture—“Our society is getting meaner,” claims one—Colossian resolutely walks participants through various exercises to identify areas of conflict, and helps the pastors work through their differences, respectfully and with love. So far so good. It quickly becomes clear, however, that there’s a major obsta…
Read More…d the 2008 election; as I’ve argued before, he gained support across the a number of demographic groups, and it’s difficult to make the case that Obama won because he finally shed the Democrats’ (imagined) hostility to religion. If you’re a religious person whose faith compels you to favor government programs to support the less economically blessed among us, pulling the lever for McCain-Palin probably wasn’t in the cards. To add insult to injury…
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…limited to procreation; that it was acceptable to limit family size for a number of reasons; and that it was licit to use the naturally occurring sterile period to do so. Enter Catholic physician John Rock. By designing a contraceptive that used hormones already present in a woman’s body to mimic the natural infertility of a pregnant woman, he hoped the Vatican would find a theological basis to approve the method. In 1958, when the Pill was alrea…
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…either uses crosses in worship. Both situate latter-day revelations in the New World, and employ Mesoamerican imagery in their art and architecture. Both have centralized authorities headquartered in unlikely towns. And both movements favor dramatic temples that resemble, to varying degrees, the unfortunate love child of Washington D.C.’s stern classicism and Disneyland’s whimsy. Is this convergent evolution? Is there a single divine playbook for…
Read More…dy late last week looking how religious beliefs influence perceptions on a number of different issues. A quick-and-dirty look at the results would tell you that religion doesn’t change much, with a few notable exceptions. For example, this surprising statistic: “60% of those who oppose gay marriage say religion is the most important influence on their views.” One wonders where the other 40% comes from. Likewise, social issues come in dead last on…
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