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Will Sisters Save the Catholic Church?

By Mary E. Hunt

…Carol Keehan, President and CEO of the Catholic Health Association of the United States, a nearly 100-year-old coalition of more than 1000 non-profit hospitals, spoke knowledgeably and honestly about the contents of the bill. Her organization reasoned that any lingering doubts on the abortion question (and there were few if any among well-informed people on both sides of the question) were more than outweighed by the thirty million uninsured peop…

New Poll Shows Religious Right and Left Look Very Different

By Daniel Schultz

…e pews more than once a week, compared to 25% of progressives. Once-a-week numbers are a little more balanced: 37-36. Does this mean that conservatives are more religious than progressives, or that there’s something about church that makes one a conservative? Nope: evangelical and Catholic churches typically offer more than one service a week. Mainline congregations, which tend to be smaller, are open for business only on Sundays. As for the surpr…

GOP isn’t Pro-Life After All

By Patricia Miller

…re Act to allow insurers to opt-out of providing maternity care as a basic service, as many conservatives have requested, with the goal of reducing premiums. “We have what’s called an X chromosome, which means we can’t have a baby,” he said on a Houston radio show to justify the oft-repeated claim that requiring plans to cover the health care costs associated with a pregnancy is unfair to men. Setting aside whatever meaning we might make of the fa…

Evidence of Big Bang Discovered!

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…s story has made in the non-science press, at least not yet. Religion News Service noticed the discovery’s implications for the quickness of the origins of the universe. But I’ve seen little else about the human implications of this new snapshot of our human origins. Perhaps people are wary of overhyping, or not understanding the science. Fortunately as a religion writer I am subject to neither restriction. And when you see this video of the infor…

Beck Plus God Does Not Equal X

By Anthea Butler

…Jail” to support Beck’s message to honor special men and women in military service. For the resounding end to her remarks, King seemed briefly to speak in tongues, and then a small chorus began to sing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the “black national anthem.” I can guarantee you, that is not a hymn the predominately white crowd at the Mall on Saturday could sing along with. James Weldon Johnson is rolling around in his grave, for real. Think of it…

Christian Terrorism Comes to Milwaukee

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…Afghan conflict was an Egyptian, Mahmud Abouhalima, who later lived in the United States, where he became one of the chief organizers of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Baruch Goldstein, the Jewish terrorist who killed scores of innocent Muslims praying at the interfaith Shrine of the Cave of the Patriarch in the West Bank city of Hebron, had formerly served in the Israeli army. Rev Michael Bray, an anti-abortion activist who was allege…

Why Nobody Should Be Surprised That Pope Francis Made Problematic Comments About Judaism — And That He Remains Unapologetic

By Ilan Benattar

…the rising forces of reactionary nationalism in the late 2010s, Francis’s service as the Bishop of Rome has seen a marked shift away from the fiercely anti-communist rhetoric of Pope Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II. Perhaps, then, this is why it came as a surprise to many, including the Israeli Rabbinate, that in an August 11th homily Pope Francis would express full-throated endorsement of a belief which, in contemporary parlance, could be glo…

“I had been part of the problem of Islamophobia”: Pastor Danny Cortez On This New Era

By The Editors

…er the election, I reached out to a local imam and was invited to a prayer service. I wanted to show them physically that people of faith, especially those who claim to be Christian, weren’t against them and would stand with them in this climate. When I was invited to come to the mic, I made a confession. I confessed that, in the past, I had been part of the problem of Islamophobia. I had negative attitudes toward them. But then I realized that I’…

New Poll Reveals That Anti-Trans Rhetoric isn’t Just Affecting Republicans and White Evangelicals

By Chrissy Stroop

…mple, 86% of White evangelicals said there are only two genders, with that number rising to 92% in 2023. The report also states, “Among White Christian groups, White evangelical Protestants (82%) and Latter-day Saints (72%) are much more likely than White Catholics (51%) and White mainline/non-evangelical Protestants (50%) to strongly feel there are only two genders.” None of this is particularly surprising, but what I do find both surprising and…

Bush Has Helped the Scarecrow of American Religion

By Hussein Rashid

The current President of the United States, George W. Bush, is often derided for his mis-speaks—malapropism is too elite, one could even say too Yale-like— and comical facial gestures. More importantly, he is heavily criticized for his policies, whether they be economic, foreign, or faith-based. The reality is that he has contributed greatly to the one area that American public life has been sorely lacking: religion. I don’t mean the practice of…