Religion Dispatches
…the term “flirting” in the headline of the piece in question to the author himself. We know, as editors, that writers don’t have much say in those headlines. Our apologies to Mr. Lean for putting words in his mouth.]…
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…cally or pastorally to the pressing issues of the family? Going back to repair and repent seems to be a logical part of the process of going forward. Attitudes like Archbishop Chaput’s are the reason why the church continues to struggle with that necessary process. The weight of the abused bodies of children, the suicides, the drug addictions, and the terror of those who have been silenced, still speak. It will be a very long time before the past…
Read More…of appeals’ denial of Little Sisters’ request for an injunction; in other words, her ruling only temporarily stops the government from enforcing the regulation against Little Sisters and its co-plaintiffs. How the case will ultimately turn out is far from clear. But as Georgetown Law School’s Marty Lederman points out in a new post at Balkanization, the hitch is not in the law, but in Little Sisters’ case itself. Little Sisters of the Poor, an or…
Read More…d for the Supreme Patriarch Tep Vong, who is viewed as an extension of the ruling party, to resign if he failed to recover the urn. A prominent activist monk later called for the Minister of Cults and Religion to step down if he also couldn’t get the job done. In contemptuous remarks captured by reporters at the confrontation, Vong said it wasn’t his fault, and went on to blame the security guards who were arrested. He said the monks who demanded…
Read More…erence in Tel Aviv, Sandy Shoshani, who ran a crisis pregnancy center in Jerusalem. The conference was not a Jewish event, but rather one aimed at converting Jews to Messianic Judaism, or belief in Jesus as the Messiah. When in Jerusalem a few days later, I sought out Be’ad Chaim (the group’s rough translation of “pro-life”). I stopped by the nondescript office building of dentists, doctors, and lawyers, and rang the bell at the locked third floor…
Read More…ns from an earthquake that hit Jerusalem in the year 33 AD. The story made worldwide headlines. Wait, I hear you asking, wasn’t that Shroud thing proved to be a fake long ago? Well, yes. Whatever else it is, the Shroud is one of the most studied objects in the world. In the late 1970s, physicist John P. Jackson formed a group called the Shroud of Turin Research Project (surprisingly often abbreviated STURP). After five years analyzing “sticky tape…
Read More…ny of the local congregations. When I told him I was an atheist, the first words out of his mouth were not, “Why?” but “I respect that.” After the success of our atheism roundtables, I attempted to organize another community forum entitled “Confronting Homophobia in the Black Church” at Zion Hill with Pickens’ support. However, shortly before the date of the event, he called to say church officials were giving him static and that we’d have to canc…
Read More…problem arises not in publication, per se, but in syndication. Witness the headlines chosen by two well-respected publications that republished Jacobs’ post—Salon and AlterNet: “Study: Religious more likely to lie for financial gain” and: “Study: Religious People More Likely to Lie for Financial Gain” There’s been a strangely persistent myth associated with Democrats, liberals, progressives, and the Left that they’re “anti-religion.” This myth h…
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…worse than Orwell, or Kafka, or Collins. It’s a through-the-looking-glass world of a prison that promised to stop its force-feeding of inmates during the month of Ramadan, out of “respect” for the sunrise-to-sundown fast. We’re not only trapped in logic games and double speak. We are a bump on a vinyl record hopping over the same track as the scratch gets louder and louder, but we never hear it. The children playing the Hunger Games at camp can r…
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…of England, the President of the People’s Republic of China, and the lost ruler of Zamunda rolled all into one.” Indeed, it should give everyone pause that the world’s most famous and beloved black nun is a fictional character instead of an actual black sister-saint. It should also come as no surprise to discover that the character of Sister Mary Clarence was very loosely based on the life of an actual black nun, who fought to revolutionize Catho…
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