Religion Dispatches
…stitutions for youth will be stripped bare because of lawsuit payouts, and number of vocations, already low, will become even lower because of the stigma attached to being a priest. The test of Moral Credibility has been found wanting, and the handwriting is on the wall. Even the National Catholic Reporter’s editorial page has called for the Pope to provide answers. No doubt about it, this is perhaps the second biggest crisis in “Christendom,” out…
Read More…studied and understood. Any doctrine that would be used to exclude a good number of the earth’s people from full equality before the law and God should be very carefully examined. When it comes to gay issues, most Mormons have only the muddiest understanding of what life is like for gay people or about the doctrinal reasons their LDS leaders say and do the things they do. In fact, most Mormons have only the muddiest understanding about what their…
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…w, while 55% of Americans as a whole have a favorable view of Israel, that number jumps to 80% among White evangelicals. And further, among evangelicals who support Israel, up to 50% have suggested End Times prophecies are part of their motivation. There are surely some whose uncritical support of Israel is motivated by End Times prophecies, though there’s significant disagreement on that point. What I would argue instead is that Christian Zionist…
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…is that White people do not attend Juneteenth festivals in any appreciable numbers. This month I attended two Juneteenth festivals in the Columbia, South Carolina metropolitan area and the results were the same: minimum White attendance. Both events were free to the public, with ideal weather and plenty of good food and entertainment. Whereas a cross-section of Black America was in attendance, Whites stuck out like rice in chocolate pudding. But t…
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…e United States, and immigrants from Catholic countries may be pushing the numbers up. As a symbol of Catholic catechesis, and as a representative of a seemingly humbler, more educated past, Adele may have a chance to make her mark. If she does, the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help will need some visitor accommodations—like a parking lot. It might look to Lourdes to improve its website: on the official site for the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes,…
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…false one. With well over 100,000 deaths as of publication, more than the number of service members killed in World War I, America is living through an apocalyptic moment. But it’s also an apocalypse in the literal sense of an unveiling or disclosure—an unmasking. The coronavirus has unmasked how our lives are marked by a profound mutual dependence that challenges our self-understanding and political ideologies. It has unmasked a federal governme…
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…ns of the brain that remain unactivated in the rest of us. There are any number of weird implications and outright contradictions in these sorts of studies. The first is this: do the authors of these studies believe that religious belief or practice has the power to effect the size of the human brain? If so, that would seem to grant an astonishing power to religion to effect real world, and very nearly miraculous changes. Or perhaps the claim i…
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…wo piles. The first, what we might call “neurotheologies,” is comprised of books and articles that attempt to objectify and validate religious experiences with data about the brain. These studies were especially common in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when medical researchers and scholars of religion started training neural imaging technologies on the brains of meditators, shamans, and mystics with the hope of isolating neural circuitry that was…
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…be live-streamed, starting Wednesday, June 15). The bishops will take up a number of issues, from the revised liturgy to assisted suicide, but their conversations are sure to be dominated by an issue that has been dogging them since the mid-1980s: sexually abusive priests and the bishops who enabled them. Ten years after Cardinal Bernard Law became the poster bishop for failed religious leadership, new revelations of episcopal misfeasance threaten…
Read More…e latest in a series of provocative, offensive, and frankly fratboyish Facebook posts coming from Israel’s embassy in Ireland. They go from digs at Ireland (“naïve”) for joining Europe and much of the world in voting for an upgrade in Palestine’s status at the United Nations, to the most recent—an allegation that, if Jesus were alive today, he would probably be lynched by hostile Palestinians. Nobody at the embassy seems to know who’s writing and…
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