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Francis Visits the Church that John Paul Broke

By Patricia Miller

…to mass in any given week and there were nearly 60,000 Catholic priests and 135,000 nuns, with the nation’s 18,800 parishes boasting an average of two priests each. The sacraments were still a major part of most Catholics’ lives: there were nearly 1 million baptisms and 350,000 Catholic marriages. The controversy over Humanae Vitae ten years earlier had largely subsided; most Catholics used birth control and most priests ignored the issue. The Cat…

What To Do When Fred Phelps Arrives in Your Neighborhood

By Susan Henking

…Airport on June 13, and her funeral is coming up on Saturday morning, June 18. Cohocton is not alone in this, as it joins the many other small towns and cities in the United States and beyond that mourn the consequences of militarism and war. Nor is the town alone as it is forced to join other places where sexuality is contested in contemporary American culture in overt ways. Cohocton is a small town, with a population in 2009 of about 800 people…

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

By Patrick Hornbeck

…rtainly this is not too much to do for these people who are caring for our spiritual welfare. In the very same year Congress added the words “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, and in 1956, it mandated that “In God We Trust” appear on U.S. currency. Neither required by free exercise, nor prohibited by establishment In the suit brought by the Freedom from Religion Foundation and several of its leaders, Judge Crabb ruled that the housing allowa…

Grasping At Straws: The Problem with Common Ground on Abortion

By Frances Kissling

…ortions say it is in part because they cannot afford a child. That is about 800,000 women and girls each year. The only bill they support, The Reducing the Need for Abortions and Supporting Parents Act, includes only a fraction of what would be needed for women to be able to provide for children. The bill was first introduced in 2006 and has never even made it to full committee consideration. None of the groups or individuals active in the common…

Why I Wrote the Freedom Seder And Why It’s Still Necessary 50 Years After Dr. King’s Assassination

By Arthur Waskow

…transformative Haggadah that eventually was called “The Freedom Seder.” In 1969 it was published in Ramparts magazine, where tens of thousands greeted it with joy: a religion they could share! And on April 4, 1969, the first anniversary of Dr. King’s murder and the third night of Passover, we held a Freedom Seder in the basement of a Black church in Washington DC, with about 800 people, Jews and Christians, Black and white. It was not only my eng…

Why Faith Needs Redemptive Struggle to Be Meaningful

By Liz Theoharis

I have had the honor of working extensively with the Rev. Dr. William Barber II, beginning when he keynoted the launch of the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice in November 2013. It has been a fruitful partnership in all respects. In his new book, Rev. Barber reminds us of the importance of education and history in the long struggle for justice and righteousness. Referring to how those in power kept the poor divided in histor…

Partisanship Is The New Civil Religion

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…id nothing” for the economy. Unemployment, he suggests, was still at 15% in 1940. No, what got us out of “the doldrums” (his word) was the War. This one is a puzzler. First, what would unemployment rates have been without the New Deal and Roosevelt’s elaborate system of public works projects? Second, we’ve already got two wars on our hands, and they aren’t helping the economy. In short, 2009 is not 1929. We really are in uncharted territory, as mo…

The Right Questions Kamala Harris’ Blackness — Yet as Long as She Holds Any Power She’ll Always Be Too Black for Them

By Mary Rambaran-Olm

…ategy memo she’s painted as: a middle-aged hag who lives in a cave with her 800 cats; unqualified to lead because her womb’s as empty as Jesus’ tomb; and hatching a master plan to suppress the aromatic scent of electricity. If I weren’t merely an outside agitator, I’d be sure to only cast my ballot for someone who’s birthed their own children, just like all the previous presid— wait, what? Anyway, Kamala cackles like Satan or something. You see, i…

The Burning Houses of Worship We Missed

By Gordon Haber

…gely Muslim Turkic group spread throughout Central and East Asia. More than 11 million Uighurs live in Xianjiang District of Western China, where officials have reportedly bulldozed over 800 mosques. Authorities have also detained hundreds of thousands of Uighurs in re-education camps. The scale of the suffering is difficult to imagine. In fairness, there’s been a lot of good reporting about the plight of the Uighurs. And yet I believe the outpour…

Rep. Cleaver’s ‘Awoman’ Prayer Enrages Christian Nationalists Who Taste Their Own Medicine and Still Miss the Point

By Andrew L. Seidel

…When Elizabeth Cady Stanton was fighting for women’s equality, she wrote an 1896 essay entitled, “The Degraded Status of Woman in the Bible.” The title says it all, but Stanton was never one to equivocate: “So far from woman owing what liberty she does enjoy to the Bible and the church, they have been the greatest block in the way of her development.” I’ve heard my boss, Annie Laurie Gaylor, a feminist author and activist in her own right, make th…