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“You Lie!”: Messing with American Mass

By Ben Brazil

…lass have relied on it when they called on the nation to pay more than lip service to our highest ideals. In fact, it was his voicing of these sentiments at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that launched Barack Obama onto the national political stage. Responding to “spin masters” and “negative ad peddlers,” he said: …there is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America…

Skip the Sexy Nun Costume This Halloween

By Liz Bucar and Emma Cieslik

…rated individuals like women religious, who devote themselves to religious service, and wear specific clothing as part of their religious calling. Before the profession of religious vows, Sister Allison tells us, there’s a ceremony attended by the community where a new sister is blessed with special prayers and receives her habit for the first time. Sr. Orianne Pietra René, another sister of the Daughters of Saint Paul, explains that the habit “mu…

Notify This! Vatican Bungles Response to Sexual Ethics Book

By Mary E. Hunt

…han, a Daughter of Charity, and Sister Simone Campbell, a Sister of Social Service, parted company with the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops not once, but twice, in the health care debates. Their Catholicism trumped the Catholicism of the bishops in the minds of legislators and perhaps of President Obama himself. So it is with Margaret and Elizabeth that their well-reasoned, experience-encompassing, pastorally sensitive work simply tru…

Gimme That Old Spice Religion

By Frederick Clarkson

…ng a long unlit cigar, and inexplicably accompanied by two armed Sudanese “freedom fighters” in military garb. “The photo was taken,” Jennifer writes, “in the upper Nile. My husband, cool as a cucumber in the 120-degree heat, demonstrates that it is possible to be well-dressed even in the far reaches of Africa.” RD contributor Kathryn Joyce, author of the forthcoming Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement (Beacon Press, March 2009),…

Postcard from the Vatican

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…ts own ATM machines (with prompts in ecclesiastical Latin), its own postal service; it even has its own gasoline station, set prettily next to an ornate Renaissance foundation. The Vatican also presides over its own courts and its own laws. Such “canon law,” as it is called, forms the very heart of Roman Catholic ethics, as it also informs the administrative handling of cases such as those initiated by these recent revelations of widespread priest…

“Little Sisters” Being Sold As Face of Contraception Case

By Patricia Miller

…es that requiring the sisters to notify the Department of Health and Human Services that it intends to opt-out of the contraceptive mandate, as allowed under the so-called accommodation provided by the Obama administration, is actually a “permission slip where we authorize the use of our religious health plan to offer services that violate our beliefs and waive our protections under federal civil rights laws. That’s why they need our signature.” W…

The Jewish Daily Forward is Neither Jewish, Nor Daily (But Still Forward). Discuss!

By Brook Wilensky-Lanford

…n the Jewish media universe, as the Forward itself reported, even the wire services newspapers rely on are subject to politicization—the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), founded in 1917, has new, more vocally right-leaning competition as of 2011 in the Jewish News Service. One might expect a certain flavor of conservatism from The Forward, a 118-year-old legacy newspaper, that was originally (and still is) published in Yiddish, a language that few…

Queer Religion and Community at HRC Summer Institute

By Rebecca T. Alpert

…learned [to] continue to create authentic ways to communicate care in the service of advancing justice.” Mentor Patrick S. Cheng provides a fitting summary of the connection we experienced: “As a gay Asian American theologian, I frequently live at the toxic intersections of homophobia, racism, and extreme secularism. However, for me the HRC Summer Institute was a life-giving experience of faith, hope, and love. We have done a new thing, and I loo…

America No Longer a Christian Nation: And Other Critical Data from 2015

By Daniel Cox and Joanna Piacenza

…white mainline Protestants (53%)—are opposed to these so-called “religious freedom” laws, with one important exception: a slim majority (51%) of white evangelical Protestants favor them. 5) …but Christians are divided on same-sex marriage. Similar numbers favor (46%) and oppose (46%) allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry legally—but attitudes vary significantly by denomination, with white Evangelical Protestants, Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witness…

“My Prayer Flies Like a Word on a Wing”: How I Lost One Leper Messiah, and Gained Another, Part 5

By Mark Dery

…great salvation/ of bullshit faith,” then makes an about-face, paying lip service to the Buddhism of his hippie days: “If I don’t explain what you ought to know/ You can tell me all about it/ On the next Bardo.” Finally, just to keep his bases covered, he makes an offering at the empty altar of existentialism: “Don’t believe in yourself/ Don’t deceive with belief/ Knowledge comes with death’s release…” “Questioning my spiritual life has always be…