Search Results for:

help find cheap airline tickets phone number 1-800-299-7264

Too Late for Apologies: Three Steps the U.S. Bishops Should Take to Prevent Another Sexual Abuse Scandal

…he bishop should not be adversarial or distant. Review boards are meant to help a bishop do his job.  Second, standardize review-board procedures. Not all review boards are created equal. In Philadelphia, for example, review board members were pressured to judge allegations according to the norms of canon law. In one case, a canon lawyer who attended board meetings claimed that because an alleged act of abuse was committed against a 17-year-old in…

Read More

When Corporations are “Persons” Under the Law: The Real Problem With Health Care

…were more mundane and predictable: Section Two redefined how we distribute numbers of representatives state-by-state, by “counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed”; and Section Three excluded from future service any member of the government who had previously sworn an oath of office to the State and then joined the Confederacy in open rebellion. Predictable stuff, really. After winning the War, Washington int…

Read More

Bush Has Helped the Scarecrow of American Religion

…that not all Evangelicals believe in the “Gospel of Gun.” Some care about helping the poor and protecting the environment. More American Jews are coming out to say that being pro-Jewish doesn’t automatically being pro-Israel, nor is all criticism of Israel anti-Semitic. Although the actions of Osama bin Laden were catalytic in organizing the silent majority to speak out against atrocities done in the name of Islam, it is actually President Bush w…

Read More

Ideology is More Than Skin Deep: Why I Can’t Get Along To Go Along

…der to bring them into the fold gently. This tantalizing idea fails on any number of levels. For example, a quick scan of history finds Pope Clement scolding the Corinthians for their argumentativeness 50 years or so after Paul wrote to them. So much for the ideal of unity. It also misrepresents the scriptural witness on conflict. On issue after issue throughout the Old and New Testaments, conflicts are not synthesized, not transformed, often not…

Read More

The American Media’s Longterm Ambivalence About the Papacy

…mage forecasts that Life’s Catholic coverage would differ from Time’s in a number of ways. First and most obviously, it depicts a woman; second and perhaps less so, it depicts work. The lives of Catholics, the picture says, do not require the stillness or the clerical luxury depicted in many of Time’s cover images of prelates and popes. Life’s cover images of lived-religion would continue with the then-famous Dionne sisters (the first known quintu…

Read More

Newsweek’s Strange Faces of the Christian Right List

…ople who aren’t associated with the Christian right. Ten is a pretty small number to best represent a movement Newsweek describes as “changing and growing more diffuse, even as it remains a potent force in American politics.” While some of the picks seem obvious (Marjorie Dannenfelser of the anti-choice group Susan B. Anthony List, or Jim Daly, the new head of Focus on the Family, or Robert George mastermind of the Manhattan Declaration) legal sch…

Read More

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

…rk was truly groundbreaking in terms of on-screen trans representation and helped educate the public about the realities of trans experience. Meanwhile, Caitlyn Jenner came out in 2015, and while her right-wing Christian politics were and remain awful, her coming out generated a great deal of buzz about trans people. Despite the inevitable misgendering tantrums lobbed at Jenner by her fellow White evangelicals, Americans were learning about trans…

Read More

The New Age Fantasy of a Celtic Church that Revered Nature and the Divine Feminine Never Existed — So What?

…r sect—the mythic has always served a purpose: to generate usable history, helpful fiction. While Arnold J. Toynbee in the second volume of his landmark A Study of History describes an “abortive Far Western Christendom of the ‘Celtic Fringe,’” it’s more accurate to speak of an alternate Christianity, an idea more myth than reality. Today, the idealization of Celtic Christianity endures in any number of manifestations, from a community like Iona to…

Read More

In a Powerful Statement Black Presidents and Deans Say: No More Stolen Black Lives!

…meframe. Of course, statements are written all the time. I can’t count the number of statements and petitions I’ve signed over the last decade about one issue or another. This is why we knew we could not, we would not, simply offer a few words proclaiming our disgust. We wanted actionable items, matters that we could take up within our local communities and the academy. Already, we’ve followed up this statement by a discussion with the Association…

Read More

Jesus Christ and Super Stars: How The Holy Rolled Mainstream in Pop Music

…r prayers. But these ultra-devout performers share a peculiar space with a number of other artists whose personal faiths are inconsequential to their public personae but whose fluency in the holy plays out in, well, mysterious ways. Lana Del Rey’s catalogue runs deep with both religious imagery and sentiment; waves of apostasy crash over moments of divine revelation and then reverse course back into faith again. She may have claimed “God’s dead…[a…

Read More