Religion Dispatches
…ide epidemic of rising medical costs, disparate levels of care and growing numbers of uninsured or underinsured Americans,” the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy recently reported. “You’re describing the perfect storm,” Neil Calman, CEO of the Bronx, New York-based Institute for Family Health, a speaker at the event, responded to an audience member’s comment: “People are going to find the situation will get increasingly worse and go…
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…on Time’s list, everything from the Mormons to monks rioting in Tibet, the new evangelicals, the Kosher workplace debacle—and even the Catholic church on aliens.) 2.) Heading the list of TOP TEN RELIGION STORIES FROM RELIGION NEWS WRITERS is the “Pastors Gone Wild” story. Religion journalists agree that the top story of the year was that of presidential candidates and the pastors they kept company with; Jeremiah Wright “damned” America, discredite…
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…coverage in the mainstream media, it was covered by Christian conservative news outlets, where Colson is a revered figure. In response to news of the award ceremony, I wrote a piece for Buzzflash entitled “The Fallen Have Risen: Charles Colson honored by White House,” and subtitled “In his final days in office, President Bush is pallin’ around with a former felon and bomb plotter.” Despite the snarky subtitle’s intentional dig at Bush, the article…
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…ew thousand words over their original word limit, but I still had to cut a number of compelling stories of people who have struggled with body shame because of internalized cultural/religious norms and narratives about weight, disability, chronic pain or illness. I also had to omit some of my analyses of examples of the culture of physical improvement. For instance, in the chapter on aging, I nixed a rather lengthy critique I’d developed of Deepak…
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…r eight years of Obama time could mean for progressive advancement in this new century! Because make no mistake: the new labor movement is solidly progressive. It has been the biggest single force promoting universal, government-supported health care coverage, protecting Social Security from Wall Street privatizers, and advancing a green jobs/green energy future. But that’s not all. The racist, jingoist, homophobic, misogynistic movement of Americ…
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…o take their spiritual business elsewhere. We have seen an increase in the number of American politicians who are asked to remove themselves from communion lines and, recently, priests have even denied parishioners communion if they vote for a political candidate who favors abortion rights. This exclusion from the sacrament is essentially a form of excommunication. Dogma Over Diplomacy Ironically, at a time when many earnest believers are being tu…
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…nce existed mainly to train full-time pastors faced reductions in both the number of churches that could support such positions and the number of people eager to take the more challenging, but lower paying, church jobs that remained. Some seminaries shifted their missions to serve the academy or society more broadly, while others trained more part-time, second-career and lay pastors. These shifts were less abrupt than decisions to close or merge a…
Read More…al, leaving the American church with a massive money problem and shrinking numbers of parishioners on the eve of Pope Francis’ arrival. A recent study by Nicholas Bottan and Ricardo Perez-Trugila in the Journal of Public Economics revealed that, unsurprisingly, “a scandal causes a persistent decline in the local Catholic affiliation and church attendance.” “Some Catholics join other religious denominations during the first three years after a scan…
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…ons about Jang, he is “encouraged that many other individuals, including a number of qualified and respected theologians, have similarly vetted related entities and materials, all arriving at different conclusions from those reported in CT,” and he remains confident, he writes, that “truth will be revealed.” Park concludes his article with a paragraph attempting to minimize the “controversy,” referring to it as an issue limited to “a few voices in…
Read More…bivalent during that state’s recent personhood battle. This could mean any number of things, of course: from the simple and unsurprising non-news that sometimes people with the same job disagree with each other; to the possibility that personhood legislation is an unsettled question for US Catholic bishops; to the question of whether the bishops’ national fight with the Obama administration over contraception coverage has hardened their other posi…
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