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Leadership Conference of Women Religious: No Retreat, No Surrender

By Anthea Butler

…of support from lay Catholics, who stood with signs outside the meeting in St Louis showing their support. Franciscan Sr. Pat Farell instructed the sisters to be “fearless” in their response to the Vatican, and the end of her speech as she stepped down from her office was a phrase she learned in Chile during the Military dictatorship. “They can crush a few flowers, but they cannot hold back the springtime.” It is probably going to take a spring st…

Walt Whitman’s Sacred Democracy

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…the democratic undertaking. –The Eds.] By reminding us of a number of the most curious headline-stories spanning the previous twelve months, RD’s “2010: What Did We Believe In?” invites a range of emotional responses. My own reactions tended to the extremes: extreme worry at some of the crass and narcissistic excess of a great deal of contemporary American religiosity; but also extreme interest in, and even a whiff of hope inspired by, the relent…

Why We Need a Public Black Theology for the 21st Century

By Vincent Lloyd

…ok the absence of Black Christian public intellectuals because many of the most prominent Black public intellectuals are scholars of religion. Undoubtedly the most famous is Cornel West, but Michael Eric Dyson, Melissa Harris-Perry, and Eddie Glaude wrote dissertations on topics related to religion, and specifically to Christianity. Derrick Bell, bell hooks, Henry Louis Gates, and Robin Kelley have all discussed religion or spirituality in their s…

Are the Girls Scouts Evil? And What About Thin Mints?

By Patricia Miller

…o hasn’t gotten the memo from Pope Francis that the culture wars are over, St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson is urging parishes in his diocese to cut ties with the Girl Scouts because the organization is “increasingly incompatible with Catholic values.” And what could members of the 100-year-old girls service organization be doing that has so alarmed Carlson? Are Brownies dissing Jesus by making Christmas trees out of old Reader’s Digests? Is so…

The High Church of Art

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…a provocative art critic, curator, and unapologetic modernist who devoted most of his professional life to the promotion of “the museum as a secular temple of art.” While the spiritual orientation of a great deal of modern Abstraction is widely recognized and widely appreciated, it was Brennan who suggested that there was a curatorial side to these ideas, one that had not been seen or explored. Certainly Kandinsky’s 1911 manifesto, Concerning the…

Arrest the Pope: New Atheist Effort to Seek Justice in Sexual Abuse Crisis Should Be Applauded

By Frances Kissling

…w priests have actually been defrocked. The European crisis is perhaps the most threatening to the political Church—the Church that claims statehood. Benedict is well aware that Europe is secular and far less deferential to the claims of special rights, and the freedom to disregard European laws it does not like. At the same time, the Church gets much more support from the European states than it does from America. In a number of countries, Cathol…

Why David Brooks Doesn’t Get the Outrage Over AIG

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ose on the Left should be in dialogue. Brooks began by observing that what most modern economists share is an intense interest in human behavior, an interest in the complex psychological motives (and yes, the faith) that drive so many of our economic choices. In contemporary economic theory, according to Brooks, there are two dominant models of analysis: number crunching and social psychology. In short, Economics is either a subset of high-order M…

Argue-by-Number: A Suggestion for the Church

By Mark D. Jordan

…d homosexuality in so many American churches? Why do we rehearse arguments most anyone active in church has already heard dozens of time? Why do we behave like prisoners? I don’t think that long-term veterans of church debates have much hope that undecided people will be persuaded by the repetition. Most of us know that persuasion happens in other, more private ways. It happens, for example, when someone close to you—a child, a sibling, a parent—d…

The Sacred and the Dead: Operator, Can You Help Me?

By Maren Haynes

…d so many others. For a few years in my early-to-mid-20s, I lived vividly amongst these eclectic, eccentric souls, each for his or her own brief but glorious chapter of our lives. We forged our connections around a table, playing games of Scrabble and cards, or listening to mix CDs, or spending nights under a canopy of stars. Transcendence came in conversations that lasted for hours—sometimes days— and meandered through our sophomoric musings on p…

In the Aftermath of the “Himalayan Tsunami”

By Luke Whitmore

…i, the cosmic energy found in forms of goddesses such as Ganga. One of the most common ways to worship Shiva is to pour water onto his physical form: the aniconic shaft of the linga, held in its ovoid yoni base. This ritual act of pouring water reenacts the union of male-female, the indivisible nature of energy and matter. From my mostly helpless location in Stevens Point, Wisconsin I have been following events through telephone, Internet media,…