Religion Dispatches
…s giving him a bad rap, this Pope is toast. Whether he resigns or not, his Papacy legacy is in tatters historically, unless he can pull off an amazing change of heart, and language. At 83 years of age, that is hard to do. At the very least he should certainly heed the calls for an emergency synod to deal with the scope of the scandal. For all of his “doctrinal purity,” he very well may be in charge of the destruction of the moral and temporal auth…
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…homosexuality. Churches’ financial success brings added clout to anti-gay pastors like Martin Ssempa—who drives his congregation into a frenzy by showing explicit and extreme gay pornography—and the politicians allied with them, like David Bahati, the sponsor of the kill-the-gays bill. Also appearing in the film is American anti-gay activist Scott Lively, who blames homosexuals for the Nazi movement and Holocaust. In the U.S., Lively is a margina…
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…s not on your side. He’s never going to be on your side. He and his fellow panelists bashed Republicans for ever claiming the “states’ rights” strategy in the first place, because it would—had it ever actually been sincere—mean that some states could opt out of banning abortion, and he portrayed the Biden administration’s reproductive freedom stance as genocide: His is an administration that is not just pro-abortion. It lives and breathes abortion…
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…holic position on physician-assisted death contradicts its support of such pain management, known as palliative sedation, he said. “If the religious tradition had towed the line firmly and said that death can’t be hastened under any circumstances, it wouldn’t have allowed palliative sedation death to occur,” he said. That may be a sign that even the strictest of religious traditions have a tendency to shift with time, and as our culture changes. L…
Read More…wledges limitations in her study, including the fact that the families who participated are a nonrandom sample. Such limitations were understandable in the 1980s when the study began since “ the targeted population was largely hidden because of the long history of discrimination against lesbian and gay people, so the possibility of recruiting a representative sample of prospective lesbian mothers was even more unrealistic than it is today.” The re…
Read More…anasia), vocations and ongoing formation (shoring up the rapidly declining number of priests and nuns) and, of course, religious freedom (Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who arranged Kim Davis’ meeting with Pope Francis, received two standing ovations from the bishops.). Then the debate turned to the USCCB’s quadrennial “Faithful Citizenship” voting guide. The bishops had voted earlier to revise the 2007 edition prepared for the 2008 election, whic…
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…ge how they understand their own identity. If academic achievement and the number or type of initials after your name is the most important thing in the world to you, then it will change how you view your own masculinity and femininity. Similarly, if having children matters most to you, then you can only be truly “manly” or “feminine” if you have kids. Is there anything you had to leave out? Historians always want to include every interesting anec…
Read More…f creation. Similarly in South Africa the Dutch Reformed Church supported apartheid because it was Biblical and part of the God-given order of creation. No one now supports either slavery or apartheid. The Biblical texts have not changed; our interpretation has. Certainly, those who oppose same-sex marriage on religious grounds would hesitate to compare themselves to those who supported slavery and apartheid, but even conservative religious pollst…
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…a few years ago to dress up as Elvis (not the young one, I’m afraid!) and participate in the ghoulish fun of resurrecting and playing with the dead. While I have a predilection for the macabre generally, and tend to be a little too preoccupied with the dead specifically, I am not opposed to the celebratory, harmless Halloween activities associated with dressing up in outlandish costumes, knocking on strangers’ doors, and consuming lots and lots a…
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…tes about yoga’s identity and transmission by introducing an invocation to Patanjali at the beginning of each yoga class, though he insisted that while yoga was a part of an ancient South Asian yoga transmission it was not specific to any religious tradition and was universally accessible. In 1975, Iyengar established the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute, named after his wife who had died in 1973. The Institute, which functioned as the c…
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