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Hold Your Applause: Potential Changes to Roles of Catholic Women and LGBTQ+ People May Just Be Vatican Breadcrumbing

By Mary E. Hunt

…erstandably praised the move. There’s also a provision to change the usual number of 10 men from religious congregations who can vote in synods to five women religious and five men religious. Why they’re somehow in a different category than other lay people remains unclear, but this counts as progress. Nathalie Becquart, a French woman and a member of the Congregation of Xavières, was named an undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops making her the…

Ten of Our Favorite Top Tens

By The Editors

…help him “become an instrument of God” and join him in creating “a Kingdom right here on Earth” (10-17-07). Mike Huckabee tells a crowd: “What we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards” (1-14-08). 6.) TOP TEN COMPARISONS BETWEEN RELIGION AND DENTISTRY: Between Google ads for “oral sedation” and “dental fear,” blogger Mark Wright writes thoughtfully about many things. On this lis…

The Progress of Christ in Commercial America: A Review of Chris Lehmann’s The Money Cult

By Peter Laarman

…delights in surfacing little-known factoids. These include the remarkable number of commercial hucksters who were preachers or else preachers’ kids (e.g., Richard Bolles of What Color is Your Parachute? fame—a former Episcopal priest) and the equally remarkable number of notable preachers who had strong commercial instincts and/or commercial roots (ranging from 18th-century superstar evangelist George Whitefield to 19th-century revivalist giant C…

Resurrection of ‘Comstock Laws’ Would Threaten Access to Abortifacients — But Even That Fear Misses Bigger Picture

By Gillian Frank

…verning sexual information and sexual representations, and expanded sexual rights and freedoms for most Americans. How that would play out on a Supreme Court with a conservative majority is uncertain. But rights and freedoms that are potentially at stake are concrete and bear directly upon the health of millions of Americans. At its core, Comstockery maintains that individuals cannot and should not be trusted when it comes to sexual and reproducti…

The Story Behind the Catholic Church’s Stunning Contraception Reversal

By Patricia Miller

…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…

Trump the Totem: Like Other Fascist Leaders, Trump has Turned from Man to Symbol — And That’s the Danger

By Robert P. Jones

…oesn’t confuse male and female.” Also, see “From Fox News to the Far(ther) Right — Calls for Violence and Retribution Follow Trump Verdict“] Sociologists have used the term “totem” to describe the way symbols come to have a powerful unifying effect among groups. This week, it struck me that this passage in Emile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life vividly captures the internal dynamics of the circus-like Trump events that have become…

In the Papal Pocket: Benedict XVI and the Press

By Mary E. Hunt

…be helpful in reporting on Judaism, Islam, the Baha’i faith, Wicca, or any number of other groups that form the pluralistic religious mosaic in the United States today? No reporter or anchor could be expected to be an expert on the ins and outs of such groups. But as a matter of journalistic practice, I think it is reasonable to train reporters to look at more than meets the eye on religion, just as they are taught to investigate plane crashes and…

Religion vs. Science: America’s Perilous Fight

By Edward J. Larson

…of evolution in public schools—as they have in Kansas, Pennsylvania, and a number of other sites—or when the government imposes religiously inspired limits on stem-cell research or other scientific activities, conflict can ensue. To be sure, most evolutionary biologists either ignore religion or find it compatible with their science, but a few of them—ardent in their scientism and evangelical regarding its social implications—turn their fire on Ch…

Catholic ‘Soul-Searching’ as Ireland Votes on Marriage; Churches, American Activists Join Kenyan Anti-Gay Group’s ‘Family’ Confab; Indian Mom Seeks Spouse For Gay Son; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…eased a detailed fact sheet on its efforts to make the advancement of LGBT rights a foreign policy priority, and Human Rights First hosted an event featuring several members of Congress and released a new report on advancing LGBT equality in Jamaica. As we have reported, American religious conservatives have stoked homophobia in Jamaica and rallied resistance to efforts to decriminalize homosexuality. The Human Rights First report takes note of th…

Refusal of Interracial Couple Shows How Slippery the Slope of LGBTQ Refusal Really Is

By Heron Greenesmith

…that marrying someone of your same gender is a choice, is speech, is not a right guaranteed by the 14th Amendment’s right to Equal Protection under the law because, in her view, and in the view of Alliance Defending Freedom, there is nothing there to protect. ADF, and Waggoner, are arguing that asking a baker to make a cake to celebrate your marriage to someone of your same gender is closer to asking a baker to make a penis cake for a bachelorette…