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Father Does Not Know Best: How To Fix the Catholic Church

…ps with the spiritually vulnerable are monitored. Helping professions have codes of conduct, professional associations, and other means of making sure their practitioners are on the up and up. Roman Catholicism needs the same. It will never happen without structural changes. Here’s How it Works… The clerical culture that arises from and permeates the Roman Catholic Church is a key part of the noxious mix in which hundreds of thousands of people ar…

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Proposition 8, Mormonism, and the Other Fight for Alternative Marriage

…lows its own members to divorce and remarry. The church has strict dietary codes, prohibiting coffee, tobacco, and alcohol, which presumably will not be available in heaven, but sees no need to legislate against their sale, even in Utah. There is the assumption that however wicked or wrong a certain behavior might be, it need not overwhelm the efforts of the Latter-day Saints to be righteous, and that, furthermore, God can adequately judge and pun…

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Why We Stay: What the History of Mormonism Reveals About the Origins of “Race”

…th their religious scriptures. From public writings like sermons and legal codes, to private writings like journals and letters, these writings all make up what I call the “Mormon archive,” which is a smaller part of the “American archive.” The archive, I argue, is not just a physical and metaphorical space where (race) history is preserved. It is also where (race) history is made. Exploring the “race of the archive,” as I call it, is a way into s…

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The Heresy of End Times Predictions

…he elected readers for their generation, offered a way to crack the hidden codes of divine scripture. In most cases, the very belief that a given reader of the Apocalypse had been divinely appointed carried with it the clear implication that those times must be very close. Otherwise, we wouldn’t need such a close and spiritually esoteric reading at all. If that is, roughly speaking, how such apocalyptic calculations have looked and behaved in the…

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Sex Abuse in the Catholic Church: When Adults are Victims

…n Diego, a pastoral and family care center dedicated to “the formation and promotion of Catholic leaders in the Hispanic community.” In her lawsuit, Birge charges that Hernandez was such an involved participant in Centro San Juan that its Director, Luis Soto, referred to him as an employee. Hernandez, who was trained at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California, and the Mexican-American Catholic College in San Antonio, was also the 200…

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Controversial Mary Statue Weeps Because ‘We’re Killing This World’

…member of his parish. He added, “If you want to believe [Ibrahim], you are free to believe her.” However, for some pilgrims, Father Ayoub’s answer simply isn’t good enough. At least one woman, who managed to get his unlisted number, screamed at him demanding that he confirm the miracle. While Marian apparitions always bring controversy, this is especially so in urban areas where neighbors rarely appreciate pilgrims blocking traffic and saying the…

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Why I Won’t Leave the Mormon Church Alone

…ommunity. In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi states, “Changing moral codes is always costly; all heretics, apostates, and dissidents know this.” Mormons who leave the church face dire consequences: damnation, separation for all eternity from loved ones, shunning and judgment in this life, as well as irritated, self-righteous assertions that we shouldn’t even discuss parts of our own history. It’s hard to invite all that, and one main reason…

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2010: What Did We Believe In?

…virulent that hatred has become. Americans are willing to throw religious freedom and tolerance out the window, a posture all too familiar in the nation’s history and sadly contradictory to the sacred principles upon which this country was founded. Opposition to the construction of a Muslim community center in New York; the brutal attack on a Muslim cabbie; the proposed burning of Qur’ans by a small church that created a media sensation; the pass…

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Zen and the Art of the Sex Scandal

…r life, respect for property, sobriety, etc. all seem identical to Western codes of conduct, they arise differently in Buddhism. The Decalogue was revealed by divine commandment. In Buddhism, there’s no creator deity. Nor is there any central Buddhist institution, such as a Vatican. Rather, in establishing one of humanity’s first monastic orders, the Buddha set forth a matrix and process of conscious behavior (vinaya) based on actual conduct. As s…

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Dangerous Religion

…of Leo Frank and a host of discriminatory practices against Jews, harassed freed blacks and others by wearing white hoods and engaging in despicable, cowardly, and murderous acts, and enacted numerous policies that forced Native peoples to convert to Christianity. • From the early decades of the twentieth century on through to the end of the twentieth century, white Protestants made sure that Japanese Americans were placed in internment camps on t…

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