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

By Krista Kapralos

…urch leaders have with parishioners, said Barbara Coombs Lee, president of Compassion & Choices, a Denver-based organization that advocates for physician-assisted death. “For most patients, and for people who are not theological doctrinal experts, that is a distinction without a difference,” she said. In practice, the choice of whether to take one’s own life in the case of a terminal illness or wait for death to come, whether naturally or through…

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

By Anne Eggebroten

…e to be reported to the police. Instead, a culture of extreme secrecy has prevailed, codified in Vatican norms issued in 1962 requiring secret investigations and prohibiting any report to civil authorities. Will Pope Benedict XVI set in motion any change to canon law? Will he step down or ask any complicit bishops to resign? Will he even order a Church-wide investigation? Unlikely. Instead, his moral authority will continue to erode. The number of…

New Anti-Gay Snake Oil for Religious Right

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…f the children examined in the paper were not being raised by parents in a committed same-sex relationship — whereas the other children in the study were being raised in two-parent homes with straight parents. They also note: “The paper inappropriately compares children raised by two heterosexual parents for 18 years with children who experience family transitions — like foster care — or who live with single or divorced parents, or in blended fami…

U.S. Bishops Reject Pope Francis’ Priorities

By Patricia Miller

…George Murry, won for the not terribly consequential post of chair of the Committee on Catholic Education. Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput beat another Francis pick, Bridgeport, CT, Bishop Frank Caggiano, for chair of the Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth, which is responsible for promoting the church’s teaching regarding hot-button issues like family and contraception (or the lack thereof). Msgr. J. Brian Bransfield was…

When God and Gender Mix: New Book Examines the Southern Holiness Movement

By Colin Chapell

…ge how they understand their own identity. If academic achievement and the number or type of initials after your name is the most important thing in the world to you, then it will change how you view your own masculinity and femininity. Similarly, if having children matters most to you, then you can only be truly “manly” or “feminine” if you have kids. Is there anything you had to leave out? Historians always want to include every interesting anec…

Renovating Marriage, One Gay Couple at a Time

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…would be “enriched” by same-sex couples. I’ve never had a straight couple come to me and say, ‘My marriage is in trouble because of the gay couple living next door.’ To the contrary, I’ve had people come to me and say, ‘Because of the love between Bob and Joe, I have learned how better to love my wife or my husband. Similarly, across the pond, the Bishop of Salisbury, the Rt. Rev. Nicholas Holtam, called marriage equality a “very strong endorseme…

Sacred&Profane: The Living Dead

By Gary Laderman

…er horrible pressures, but they do not erase memories of body bags, fallen comrades, and those martyrs missing in action who may be lost forever or whose remains find their way back to the states for final burial. The prospect of Barack Obama as the first president of the United States with African American ancestry is a thrilling possibility for so many, yet also cannot be disassociated from America’s shameful slaveholding past and the ghosts of…

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

By Andrea R. Jain

…hich functioned as the center for teacher training, greatly augmented the number of yoga teachers who received official training in Iyengar Yoga and became the headquarters from which to disseminate the Iyengar system. Today, there are thousands of Iyengar Yoga teachers and millions of practitioners in over seventy countries across the world. Some yoga advocates and pop culture critics have suggested that popularized yoga reflects only the impuls…

Will Iowa’s Abortion Ban Respect Religious Freedom?

By Christine Ryan

…aw. Religious exemptions from abortion bans offer relief to only a limited number of individuals and can never be a comprehensive legal solution to the country’s reproductive health crisis. Nor should the right to control one’s body depend on proof of one’s religious commitments; reproductive freedom is a right that depends on one’s humanity, not one’s religious beliefs. That said, attacking the status quo incrementally proved to be a winning stra…

Mormon Rejection of Trump Embarrassing for Evangelicals?

By Neil J. Young

…lifestyle and temperament. Mormons have understandably bristled at Trump’s comments from a 2014 interview that have recently come to light where he argued that Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election because many Christian voters were repelled by his “alien” faith. 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 a…