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Clergy May Soon Find Taxes Soaring As Result of an Under-the-Radar Ruling

By Patrick Hornbeck

…and nuns, Christian and otherwise, live in monasteries and convents; and a number of historic Protestant churches, especially those best endowed financially, provide parsonages. But over time, an increasing number of clergy have made their own living arrangements. Churches found parsonages prohibitively expensive; congregants preferred to see their donations go toward services rather than clergy housing; and new religious ventures, especially the…

Religious Exceptions Not So Exceptional According to New Study

By Patricia Miller

…most Catholic health care institutions have accepted the accommodation, a number of the nation’s 260 Catholic institutions of higher learning as well as Catholic nonprofits are seeking a broader exemption that would in effect bar their insurers from providing contraceptive coverage as specified under the accommodation designed by the Department of Health and Human Services. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a consolidated case challenging th…

Malta Adopts Marriage Equality Over Objections of Catholics and Evangelicals; And More in Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…eo-Nazi groups are among those who reportedly took part in the protests. A number of people were injured during the clashes. Activists also claimed they were attacked by religious groups on the street who accused them of pedophilia and used homophobic slurs against them. The Chilean LGBTI movement has held public demonstrations for nearly two decades, but Monday’s clashes are the first time the police have made arrests at them. Representatives of…

Milquetoast Liberal Religion Won’t Challenge Conservative Values: A History Lesson

By Sheila D. Collins

…d to seek or accept work, which was the view (supported by the teaching of classical and neo-classical economists) on which the nation’s existing poor law system was based. The belief that joblessness is the fault of the jobless has returned today in the assumption, shared by most Republicans, that the unemployed can be prodded into getting a job by the withdrawal of the “crutch” that extended unemployment insurance supposedly provides. Many liber…

White People Dying Younger Because of…Moral Turpitude? Give Us a Break

By Peter Laarman

…f the AIDS pandemic. Fortunately, at least for those within the chattering classes, life expectancy–and good health expectancy–continue to rise among well-educated white people. Most c-class commentators, including the New York Times editorial board, are taking a sharp breath over this despairing news but are not rushing to conclusions about what must be done. Not so the fearless fusilladiers at First Things: boss editor R.R. Reno plunged right in…

Of Zionism and Anti-Zionism: The Ultra Orthodox and the Settler Movement in Israel

By Shaul Magid

…e solution: develop Haredi communities in the territories where housing is cheap (through government subsidies), where they can maintain a lifestyle separate from secular Israel, and where their communities can continue to grow at an enormous rate. This is a particularly modern problem. The growth rate of the Haredi world is not solely the result of their big families. When you have a society that is essentially middle-class averaging seven childr…

A Shining City: The Occupy Movement and the American Soul

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ilizations, unrepressed by social orders that developed for the benefit of classed rather than for the simple human being of any and every class. Aspiration Meets Desperation Mostly, members of the various wedding parties were unperplexed by the protesters offering testimony against an economic system that excludes far too many Americans from the fullness of even the most modest constructions of “domestic bliss.” “That cat’s a f**king loser,” offe…

Richard Dawkins’ Atheist Academy of Unguided Truth

By Paul Wallace

…God loves you because your priest told you so? And so on. These were not cheap shots. He was serious. He loved us, he loved his job, and his questions were troubling. Some students wept. At which point he would offer Kleenexes. It was in Fr. Cavanaugh’s class that I began to see that all true education is intensely personal. Dawkins’ distaste for an officially atheist academy may be mere iconoclasm. But maybe not. Maybe it’s closer to the truth…

Evangelicals Clutching Pearls Over Student Debt Relief: Lord Have Mercy!

By Peter Laarman

…rking-class and blue-collar Americans aren’t actually speaking for working-class and blue-collar Americans. Then, with his usual acuity, Bouie drills right down to the real story of an epochal risk-shift and wealth-shift going back to the first resurgence of neoliberal thinking in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s: The student loan debt crisis has at least some of its origins in decisions made during the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s to reduce state support for…

Why Conservatives Really Oppose Federal Aid for the ‘Undeserving’

By Daniel Schultz

…ch. It doesn’t take much to work that out. But where does the instinct for class warfare come from? I think Stoehr is right to frame his argument in religious terms: heavenly import, sacrilege, faith and ideology, which is faith’s steely cousin. A number of years ago, I was chatting with the theologian Walter Brueggemann’s then-wife Mary on a Sunday morning. She told me she’d been bemoaning some bit of racial egregiousness or another to her husban…