Religion Dispatches
…s. North America also seems lost. American Catholics in increasingly large numbers part with the Vatican over precisely the issues one would expect: feminism and sexual ethics. Birth control and abortion are not only “litmus tests” for US Supreme Court justices; they provide the banners both progressive and anti-Modern Catholics carry into cultural battle today. It is scarcely imaginable how, given the current impasse, North American Catholics wil…
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…the perpetrators (the words “Nazi” and “German” are absent) and about the number of victims (“millions of Jews”). He was criticized for omitting any reference to his own past as a German who lived through the war and was briefly (and involuntarily) a member of the Hitler Youth. Most seriously, he made no mention of Christian responsibility for Jewish suffering. In the back of many people’s minds, and contributing to the negative response, were hi…
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…a–all in the name of morality. As someone who was raised in the Bible Belt South, in a deeply religious family, I was horrified by the religious right’s new distortion of Christianity and its deleterious impact on national and international health policy. I wanted to make sense of how the religious right had succeeded in redirecting the national terms of conversation about sex: spouting ugly homophobia, reshaming women’s sexuality in particular, i…
Read More…h Ministries (a virulent anti-gay organization that has been listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group) argued against allowing gays to serve openly in the US military. The final four paragraphs say more about Lively, the author of the notorious book The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party, than about the issue: Masculine-oriented male homosexuality tends also to be pederastic in nature, meaning that it often involves re…
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…r, more homogeneous time where, at least in geographical enclaves like the South, white evangelical voices went virtually unchallenged. On the left, there is often a similar pining for the era when the “Christian Century” was finally dawning, when Rauschensbusch, Ryan, the Niehbuhrs, and Tillich commanded the national stage, or when mainline leaders took up prominent places alongside King and Heschel in the national Civil Rights Movement. But we a…
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…mber 2007, for example, saw lengthy consultations on AIDS/HIV and Islam in South Africa sponsored by Islamic Relief International. The Sangha Metta Project brings Buddhist monks together to work on both prevention and care. And President-elect Barack Obama said in a 2006 speech to the Global Summit on AIDS and the Church, sponsored by evangelical Christian Rick Warren, that “Corinthians says that we are all of one spirit, and that ‘if one part suf…
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…civil disobedience and goes to jail to help stop war or nuclear weapons. A number of the questions are clearly designed to elicit answers the Vatican knows full well it won’t like. The data will provide the pretext for concluding that the decline in numbers in progressive groups is a result of their lack of obedience and conformity to the men’s rules. Solution: tighten up the ranks. Enter the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious, the alte…
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…mber 2007, for example, saw lengthy consultations on AIDS/HIV and Islam in South Africa sponsored by Islamic Relief International. The Sahgha Metta project brings Buddhist monks together to work on both prevention and care. And President-elect Barack Obama said in a 2006 speech to the Global Summit on AIDS and the Church sponsored by evangelical Christian Rick Warren that “Corinthians says that we are all of one spirit, and that “if one part suffe…
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…l bankruptcy, bigotry, and lack of compassion of liberalism.” Engle insists that he, an ardent foe of abortion, and not Obama, is MLK’s ideological heir. He likened the media to segregationists, calling them “Obama’s court prophets… Selma’s new sheriffs of the South beating the new heirs of the civil rights movement—the millions of unborn children attacked in the womb.” But despite his militant exhortation to go to war with fellow Americans, his f…
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…s came from all sectors. “They’re pandering to the Jewish octogenarians in South Florida,” or “they’re pandering to the Christian Zionist evangelicals.” Each may be true but neither answers the question satisfactorily. As for the Jewish Floridians, many will not vote for Obama anyway, not because he doesn’t love Israel enough but because he is black. This is the dirty little secret of a certain generation of American Jews. American Jewry has spent…
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