Religion Dispatches
…n interfaith dialogue; his role has been more akin to a head of state when dealing with other traditions. For example, in medieval interactions between the Ottoman Sultan and the Vatican, the Pope was a head of state who negotiated treaties, sending emissaries to deal with theological issues. In many respects, the Pope’s letter can be seen as a return to his traditional role, of guiding his flock. For proselytizing faiths, interfaith dialogue cann…
Read More…for Marriage has set up on Wednesday nights and we assist with the larger phone bank at the Jewish synagogue downtown. A great deal of our work is communicating with Catholics on our email list and Facebook. As a Catholic, how does your faith shape your views on marriage for LGBT people? My faith blossomed in the 1960s after Vatican II. I had always been a very pious child, and my faith became about service to others and seeing everyone as a chil…
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…umber of marriages within the church has declined by nearly half. Only the number of Catholic funerals has held steady. And while the number of Catholics overall has remained level, that’s largely due to Hispanic migration to the US; some 40 percent of those born Catholic have left the church. But numbers don’t tell the whole story. The church Francis will encounter is fundamentally different in character from the church of John Paul in two import…
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…n our side. Number 1 could be “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Number 2: “God doesn’t discriminate.” Number 3: “Sex is only for procreation.” And so on. We could get clever, of course, and assign separate groups of numbers to arguments pro and con or to thematic clusters. I can even imagine some seminary librarian proposing a sort of Dewey Decimal System to organize the arguments. This would allow long series of arguments to be cited b…
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…didn’t believe the Gallup numbers were right, and [they thought that] the best way to combat those Gallup numbers was to ask Gallup to do another survey. And so in 1978, Christianity Today, a leading periodical for evangelicals, paid Gallup to do a big survey and in addition to just asking the born-again question, they asked questions about belief in the Bible, belief in Jesus, and intent on converting others. As a result, Gallup revised its esti…
Read More…s). He even managed to joke about Sarah Palin’s bus tour antics being “the best thing that could happen” to his candidacy. Right now, Mitt Romney’s greatest problem appears to be Republican Party itself. After opportunistically handing the reins to Tea Partiers and evangelical conservatives to capitalize on unbridled rage against the nation’s first African-American president, the GOP has now cultivated a base most interested in crusading against s…
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…it has transcended religion; in all these scenarios, the West always knows best. Indeed, the West may know best because the West can change. Islam, on the other hand, is frozen, stuck in what Dipesh Chakrabarty called the “waiting room of history.” This is not, by the way, an exclusively French dynamic—the simple and inaccurate binary of a dynamic West and a static Islam, mired in the seventh century or a “medieval mindset” is stunningly common….
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…thought. Looked at for what it is, the web of connections that underlie a “best of” list reveals a portrait of a certain circle’s concerns, commitments, and fascinations. So it is below. I asked five of the writers I trust most—an anthropologist, a historian, a novelist, a journalist, and two media scholars—to share their choices for 2008’s most interesting texts that deal with religion. I say texts because I told them they were free to choose fro…
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…d. And in response to the controversy and the barrage of outraged parental phone calls, many school systems decided it was safest not to air the speech at all. Others required that alternative activities be arranged for children whose parents refused to permit their kids to be subjected to an encouraging presidential pep talk. The evening after the talk, the local news station I was watching aired a report on the event, complete with footage of a…
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…d my own heart. I tend to be confrontational with myself at first—and then deal with others. But in writing it, I realized that I was dealing with expectations others placed upon me, not my own. And I’m proud of what I came up with in that process. I feel like the song works as a celebration, a reminder that love is extremely valuable and that it’s not temporary. Writing the song was a really powerful journey for me, and so was sharing it with oth…
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