Religion Dispatches
…ing, baby-aborting, and, now, an elderly-killing people, and he used it to promote his own agenda. A false, but oft-heard stereotype of US citizens is that they are all fat. I, willfully, used this stereotype to further my own agenda. Again, I apologize, because I think it is wrong to do so. Someone who is aiming for the highest office in the United States, as Santorum is, should be held to a high moral standard, as the strong historical and curre…
Read More…s of compassion and justice but, for a variety of reasons, find it hard to promote and implement them. What’s the most important take-home message for readers? There’s a lot of a disagreement and uncertainty among evangelicals about the social role of the church. Are churches primarily supposed to strengthen believers and attract converts, or seek to improve and reform society? Do Christians have an obligation to combat the structures of poverty a…
Read More
…ionally considered so low that its denizens actually fell outside the four central categories of Indian society: priest, warrior, merchant, laborer. Particularly disconcerting to Das, the people he thought were his friends turned their backs on him when he married a poor girl from the Brahmin caste 25 years ago. He and his wife, Grace, have five children today. The fact that Indian Christians, even those who are sympathetic to the plight of poor D…
Read More…ization for Marriage’s strategy to drive a wedge between LGBTIQ people and African Americans—and to urge Latinos to avoid being assimilated to corrupt “Anglo” values that include respect for same-sex loving families. In the wake of all this, I read a recent letter from a Maryland-area bishop with new attention. Here’s a head’s up to those working on marriage equality. First, the leaders of the opposition to same-sex marriage in Maryland are not na…
Read More
…s should be seen as an ally and not an enemy. A Better Atonement has been promoted as good reading for Lent, when the meaning of the crucifixion is especially on the minds of serious Christians. But it can and should be read at any time by anyone who’s even considering whether “that old-time religion” isn’t quite good enough any more. What I started out writing, churlishly and petulantly, is that I could only surmise that the market for books li…
Read More…nt.” Yet most, if not all, of the centers maintain that Christian faith is central to their mission. Many are affiliated with Care Net, which describes itself as a “Christ-centered ministry whose mission is to promote a culture of life within our society in order to serve people facing unplanned pregnancies and related sexual issues.” Others are affiliated with Heartbeat International, which says it “does not promote birth control” because its “po…
Read More…h brothers and sisters who were so instrumental in the fight against South African apartheid are not yet ready to reckon with the apartheid nature of Israel and its current government. And I am enormously concerned that raising this issue will cause heartache to some in the Jewish community with whom I have worked closely and successfully for decades. But I cannot ignore the Palestinian suffering I have witnessed, nor the voices ofthose courageous…
Read More
…access without parental consent (youth rights versus parental rights was a central theme of many conference presentations). The PP’s promise to replace a required public school class—which includes instruction on respect for human rights and sexual diversity, among other topics—with one that would exclude “contents that could be used for ideological indoctrination,” drew high praise from participants. What emerged after three days was a clear tens…
Read More
…d the immediate criticism of the work is a theological point, as well. The central claim of Christianity is that, in the incarnation, God became fully human, just like us. I remember buying diapers for my wife’s grandfather in the days leading up to his death. Like countless others facing their demise, he had, at the end of his life, lost the ability to control even the most simplest of bodily functions. If we cannot imagine a urine-soaked cross,…
Read More
…” for the Church, Gray-Reeves argues for more of the advance work that was central to the slow success of the movement toward full inclusion of lesbians and gays. “I would love to see a resolution that suggests that we study in all of our dioceses what it means to be transgender,” she suggests. “Because if you ask the Church to go from zero to sixty on new language without presenting the challenge of studying it, and providing resources to people,…
Read More