Religion Dispatches
…to another realm of experience—a realm of heightened awareness and intense spiritual aliveness which challenges our very notions of what is real and what it means to be “awake.” The music we hear during lucid dreams is rapturous and drenched in feeling; the colors are more subtle and vibrant than the ones we see in the “real world”; the aromas and tastes are more real than real; the sex is explosive and ecstatic; and the insights are profound, if…
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…008, it is Catholic Does Not Equal the Vatican. You bet it doesn’t. In just 142 pages, six chapters, with not a wasted word, Ruether lays out once again her critique of ecclesial patriarchy as life-denying and institution-killing. “When I open her books,” writes Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, president of the Chicago Theological Seminary, in the foreword to the new book, “a force of mind and heart comes out that simply will not submit to patriarchy….
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…cs of the season seems to demand a candidate’s show of meanness. A Kind of Spiritual Egoism? Isabella, aged four, as many may know, is the eighth Santorum offspring. She recently came down with one of those attacks to which Trisomy 18 children are chronically, and predictably, vulnerable. One can only commiserate with the Santorums in their time of sorrow, as I do. My quarrel, such as it is, is with the lack of responsibility shown by the Santorum…
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…rst step in the implementation of the findings” is a personal meeting “in a spirit of mutual respect and collaboration.” This is rather fanciful since the LCWR leaders who received the document were not at all sure it was coming. They went to Rome with the intention of engaging in dialogue, not being presented with a fait accompli. Second, this move seems like an effort to cut off the head of lay people in the Church, beginning with the nuns. The…
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…ined by hay bales festooned with American flags and notices to “Vote Yes on 1 to Protect Marriage,” I met one of the grande dames of American Christian womanhood, Nancy Campbell, author of books such as Be Fruitful and Multiply and The Power of Motherhood, and the self-titled “editriss” of the internationally distributed Above Rubies magazine, a missive of “family encouragement” for women seeking to become more virtuous mothers and wives. Campbell…
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…ad cost Tyndale his life. Coverdale published his English language Bible in 1535 and, by 1537, it was being printed openly in London. When Henry VIII realized that his national church needed a national Bible, he selected Coverdale’s version as his “Great Bible.” Edward VI then commissioned the Book of Common Prayer in 1549. Both books were ordered to be purchased by every church in the land. And since “Reformation requires transformation of doctri…
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…that led to the flight of some one million Jews from Arab countries between 1947 and 1967. When Prime Minister Netanyahu, Avigdor Lieberman, and other right-wing extremists are able to point to this irrational hatred of the Jewish people as the “real” underlying message of the critics of The Occupation, they stir up fears among Israelis that seem to be rationally founded, given the hatred being expressed. All the more so when one witnesses the str…
Read More…an beings are not merely centers of consciousness or emotion, or minds, or spirits, inhabiting non-personal bodies. The human person is a dynamic unity of body, mind, and spirit. Marriage is what one man and one woman establish when, forsaking all others and pledging lifelong commitment, they found a sharing of life at every level of being—the biological, the emotional, the dispositional, the rational, the spiritual— on a commitment that is sealed…
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…schoolchildren, hippies on bicycles, office workers, and Buddhist monks. At 1:00 p.m., with the torchbearers preparing far across town, police attention turned toward the corner of the plaza where the Torch route was to end. Chinese performers sang Olympic pop promos and protesters waved signs reading “Free Tibet” and “Free Speech Now.” One man shouted, “Protect the First Amendment! This isn’t Communist China!” Police and park rangers tried convin…
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…eciate after stumbling across a little known and out-of-print book from the 1950’s, psychotherapist Don Browning’s Atonement and Psychotherapy. The account isn’t one that Browning invented—it’s far older than that. What Browning did was use the metaphor of psychotherapy to elucidate this old and profound understanding of how the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus could have a truly redemptive power in the world. Browning begins by…
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