Search Results for:

cheap airline ticket one way phone number 1-800-299-7264

Will Iowa’s Abortion Ban Respect Religious Freedom?

…tion & Religion Project and first-hand testimony, we demonstrated the many ways that religious beliefs can motivate abortion. In their own words, individuals described the religious and spiritual reasoning behind their abortion decisions. Some consulted religious doctrine or faith leaders. For others, their abortions were motivated by religious obligations they feel bound by, such as the duties one owes to others, including future and existing chi…

Read More

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

…llenging priests when they spent unusual time alone with children. John Conway, supervisor of a vocational rehabilitation program in Wisconsin in the 1970s, heard from deaf men about sexual abuse and collected affidavits, but he trusted Archbishop William F. Cousins to take care of it. Priests where Fr. Peter Hullermann worked in Essen sent him to Munich for treatment and trusted the office of Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger to make sure this predator…

Read More

Americans Say Religion is “Losing Influence”

…of increased religious influence on American society is just a cataclysm away. Religion’s saliency for political machinations, cultural inspiration, and social movements is a separate reality from the growing number of nones. Both need coverage. But the Gallup data raises questions that I’ve rarely seen addressed in recent years. What does faith look and feel like in flyover country? As a cub reporter, I wrote about the greying mainline, their in…

Read More
Protesters in Washington DC, the day before the January 6 insurrection, wrapped in American flags blow shofars.

Netanyahu’s Genocidal Religious Rhetoric isn’t Just an Appeal to the Israeli Right — He Has Another Constituency in Mind

…e Israelites came into their Promised Land . . . God had to move in mighty ways to remove their enemies. . . . Our Promised Land is Pennsylvania and we’re taking it back.” Which brings us back to Israel/Palestine. Netanyahu and American Christian nationalists not only invoke similar religious rhetoric in their desire to expand their “Promised Land,” but they also start with a parallel us vs. them religiously-coded binary that envisions Native Amer…

Read More

The American Media’s Longterm Ambivalence About the Papacy

…mage forecasts that Life’s Catholic coverage would differ from Time’s in a number of ways. First and most obviously, it depicts a woman; second and perhaps less so, it depicts work. The lives of Catholics, the picture says, do not require the stillness or the clerical luxury depicted in many of Time’s cover images of prelates and popes. Life’s cover images of lived-religion would continue with the then-famous Dionne sisters (the first known quintu…

Read More

The Faith Outreach Canard

…Eleison Group, who the RNS article notes worked doing faith outreach on a number of Democratic campaigns in 2006 and 2008 but not in 2010. In both the RNS interview and in an article on Huffington Post, Sapp argues for a causal link between lackluster faith outreach in this election cycle and Democratic losses; his conclusion: “the results were disastrous.” To support this argument, Sapp claims the following: Compared to ’06, Democrats nationally…

Read More

55% of Utah Mormons Believe LGBT People can “Change”

…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…

Read More

The Devil is in the Details

…ash for travel with the knowledge that using ATMs abroad is always a great way to get the best rates. Yep that’s right. The U.S. always considers its own currency to have slightly greater value than the local money changers and banks. They consider their own currency to have the greater value. So I lived in Indonesia for a year and a half without ever getting a local bank account. At this point the ubiquitous ATM is one way to access your own reso…

Read More

Do Space Aliens Need Baptism? The View From Gliese 581g

…stly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” What’s more, whether or not it reflects reality, there is an unavoidable psychological tendency to associate the small with the insignificant. This may be seen in the history of astronomy, which is a history of receding horizons. Scientists have often balked (and not always for scientific reasons) at man…

Read More

Commies, Blacks, Jews, the UCC and Other Threats to America

…nal Urban League, the National Baptist Convention, People for the American Way and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. My first reaction to this was to wonder why the Times is acting as Glenn Beck’s hatchet man. About the only thing these groups have in common is that they endorsed this rally. What, exactly, is the point of listing them all together? To make clear who Beck doesn’t like? To convince readers that the UCC, black Baptists and oth…

Read More