Religion Dispatches
…ntly, and the simplistic use of it seemed too manipulative. Now I’m beginning to wish it were true. What if our enemies really did just hate us because we believe in freedom? Get a grip people—maybe it’s not too late….
Read More…nd had an influential role in drafting the Council’s document on religious freedom. Murray also ran into trouble for critiquing the church’s teaching on birth control and its attempt to have that teaching written into civil law. Although he evidently personally believed in the teaching, Murray argued that in a pluralistic modern society, contraceptive use was a private, not a public, matter. Government, he wrote to Cardinal Cushing of Boston in 19…
Read More…take it back nearly 50 years to when it was on the brink of approving the use of contraception but backed down because it would codify the idea, which it had already tacitly accepted, that the purpose of marriage wasn’t limited to reproduction. This, in turn, would negate much of the church’s biological determinism around the role of women. Many of the doctrinal developments on issues related to sex and women since then have been ever-more elabor…
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…he POTUS declare his vigorous support for gay marriage (to resounding applause and boos) and the religious right declare its vigorous support of Chick-fil-A (to resounding applause and boos). The old hymn “Sweet By and By,” beloved in Southern Gospel circles, promises that “in the sweet by and by, we shall meet on that beautiful shore.” During this crucial iteration of the culture wars, which never seem to be quite fully won nor yet fully lost, Ha…
Read More…ng the line” (and fomenting outrage among base conservatives about Obama’s use of executive order—never mind the Bush administration’s use of the same) is meant to distract from the fact that the GOP does not have a viable, reasonable strategy for addressing the broken immigration system in a way that balances even the interests of its own stakeholders. Yes, immigration is one of those big-time challenges that requires an everyone-at-the-table s…
Read More…is Washington Post blog this morning, conservative Democrats are trying to use leverage their crucial vote to pressure Reid in order to get changes they want made to the bill. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, one of the anti-choice Democrats in the Senate, said plainly that “he is not happy with the current abortion language in the Senate bill. But then he turned around and said that if his opposition to the public option is satisfied, it could help mollif…
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…eason, federal judges repeat the religion and ignore the treason when they use Duché’s prayer to interpret our Constitution. Justice Alito used the Duché story to uphold a 40-foot concrete cross on government land maintained with hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars. Alito spent a paragraph on the election of Duché as chaplain without mentioning his name or his perfidy: “…Thus, when an Episcopal clergyman was nominated as chaplain, some Congr…
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…these documents. A former Air Force intelligence officer told me that the use of biblical verses on cover sheets, in his experience, is “not at all surprising.” Many of those privy to such briefings probably would have been Christian, he suspects, and the rest “knew better than to object.” Scriptural errancy Those who want to recover their traditions from conflation with errant militarism can begin by correcting some simple misunderstandings that…
Read More…entable. As Archbishop of St. Louis Mo. He was one of the first bishops to use communion as political battering ram against then candidate John Kerry. He announced that if Kerry came to St. Louis, he would not permit him to receive communion. Shortly after that he said that Catholics who voted for pro-choice candidates were committing grave sin and needed to go to confession before they could receive communion. He lauded Sarah Palin as a shot in t…
Read More…as observed, and so might well respond that statements about homosexuality used in Persona Humana are those of psychologists and biblical writers, not its own. But no amount of indirection can obscure the Vatican’s decision to use this vilifying language and not some other, in Persona Humana as well as in the much more widely read Catechism of the Catholic Church. And have no doubt, such language has serious effects. Here in the US, the media regu…
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