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Death With Dignity: Combatting Religious Opposition to Physician-Assisted Suicide

By Krista Kapralos

…eath becomes much longer and more horrible.” “Death with Dignity brings a balance back to medicine,” she said. The fight over whether terminally ill people can take their own lives has attracted religious heavyweights. The Roman Catholic Church leads the fight against the practice, and many major denominations are following. Even now, months after physician-assisted death became legal in Washington State, patients have trouble finding doctors who…

The Best the Largest Progressive Jewish Org Could Come Up With?

By Jay Michaelson

…and Jewish Funds for Justice, the latter of which had already swallowed up a number of smaller Jewish social justice organizations. I know several people who work at BtA, and I commend them on their ability to keep a secret. I and friends of mine plied several of these folks with drinks, but their lips stayed sealed. (I did find out that the org would have an action-verb in it, as is the fashion these days, but that’s all.) That being said, I’m n…

U.S. Bishops Reject Pope Francis’ Priorities

By Patricia Miller

…rmal encyclicals and other documents that leave the permanent mark of his papacy on the church. One could argue, therefore, that the lack of alignment between the priorities of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and Francis wasn’t a willful rejection of the pope’s agenda, but more of a wait-and-see attitude of exactly what that agenda was and how it could be implemented in concrete detail. But the jig is up. Its been nearly three years. The p…

Renovating Marriage, One Gay Couple at a Time

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…gays and lesbians were singlehandedly responsible for taking old houses in abandoned neighborhoods and turning them into revitalized homes and neighborhoods. The turnaround was so astounding that one year, the best sign at Atlanta’s gay pride read: “We can rehab marriage and sell it back to you at twice the price.” Seems that sign was a bit prescient. As more and more states accept same-sex marriage, researchers are showing that gays and lesbians…

Sacred&Profane: The Living Dead

By Gary Laderman

…surrecting 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 and lots of candy. Perhaps at some subterranean, unconscious societal level, as we get closer to the day of elect…

Pop Culture Yogi B. K. S. Iyengar Dead at 95

By Andrea R. Jain

…red him for his fiercely confident, direct, and demanding guidance at his Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute in Pune and far beyond. Iyengar’s widespread influence can be attributed to his success in constructing and disseminating what is known as “Iyengar Yoga,” an idiosyncratic rendition of modern postural yoga, a complex and contested collection of systems consisting of some combination of asana, or “posture,” synchronized with the breath…

Will Iowa’s Abortion Ban Respect Religious Freedom?

By Christine Ryan

…law claims to offer exceptions for medical emergencies, rape, incest, and fatal fetal anomalies, these exceptions are so vaguely written they’ll be virtually impossible to access. A Planned Parenthood-led lawsuit successfully blocked the law’s implementation since Iowa’s Republican-controlled legislature approved the ban over a year ago, but the state’s Supreme Court ended the reprieve in June by overturning the lower court’s injunction. In doing…

Mormon Rejection of Trump Embarrassing for Evangelicals?

By Neil J. Young

…In a recent article for Religion News Service, the popular Mormon blogger Jana Reiss suggested a few more reasons why Trump has a Mormon problem, including his demeaning treatment of women and his inauthentic claim to faith. The Mormon rejection of Trump also serves to further magnify Trump’s strange success among evangelical voters. While the evangelical magazine Christianity Today recently pointed out that the majority of evangelicals aren’t sup…

Can Expelled Teach Us a Thing or Two?

By Arri Eisen

…or his bit part in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Expelled makes the claim that Academic Science has erected a wall around itself and the theory of evolution, and that anyone, including scientists, who dares to question evolution, who tries to scale that wall, is ostracized by the system. This, according to the movie, is an affront to freedom, a basic right upon which America was built. The movie focuses on five or six folks (all of whom are challengin…

An Unholy Holy Week: Is the All-Male Rule of the Roman Catholic Church Self-Destructing?

By Anne Eggebroten

…o ring hollow. “Call no man father,” warned Jesus in a passionate diatribe against “those who love the place of honor” and like to be called rabbi or teacher (Matthew 23). “Woe to you!” he repeated, describing the leaders of his day as whitewashed on the outside but inside full of “all kinds of filth.” In fact, deference to “Father” is at the heart of this mess. Nuns now report not challenging priests when they spent unusual time alone with childr…