Religion Dispatches
…literally than some of their fellow prelates. Here’s a rundown: • New York Cardinal Timothy “Capitalism is King but you can get your birth control at 7-11” Dolan lives in a 15,000-square foot neo-Gothic mansion on Madison Avenue appraised at $30 million. • Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, who warned a few years back that the local gay pride parade might “morph into something like the Ku Klux Klan,” lives in a “one of a kind,” 19-chimneyed mansi…
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…ip for the chattering classes. I will always identify proudly with the radical camp. I don’t think there can be any compromise with white supremacy or entrenched corporate power. But I do still wonder whether my side is really as radical as it claims to be. I worry about performative wokeness and virtue signaling and the kind of celebrity activism that these days is often fueled by Hollywood and hedge fund money (in some ways reenacting the much-d…
Read More…Foundation this week on behalf of students from Soddy-Daisy High School, Scales sent an e-mail to all local principals on Tuesday, saying the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled prayer before football games and graduation ceremonies to be unconstitutional and that the practices should be stopped. “But things are handled a little differently in different areas of the country,” Scales said. “This does not need to be something that divides our community. N…
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…l reasons; they work together to make arguments under the framework of current legal doctrine that LGBT people do not need protection from discrimination or equal marriage rights. But make no mistake, conversion therapy advocates cannot be separated from their supposed religious motivation, and the harm [they] inflict on LGBT people because of a belief that we are somehow inferior is a heinous moral wrong they must one day grapple with.” …
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…ity problems, backed-up sewers, and limited access to food delivery or medical care. Whether genuinely moved or Twitter-shamed into action, Lakewood Church put up a page on its website lateMonday to collect donations and seek volunteers for Samaritan’s Purse, a nondenominational evangelical international relief organization that is a member of VOAD. Lakewood Church tweeted: Coordinating with the city, Lakewood is a collection site for distributing…
Read More…to AP. The initiative will ask Slovaks “whether they agree that a marriage can be called only a union between a man and a woman, same-sex partners can’t adopt children, and that children wouldn’t have to attend school classes on sex education if their parents don’t agree with them.” Trinidad: Catholic Archbishop Tells Parents Not to Kick Out Gay Kids Trinidad Catholic Archbishop Joseph Harris spoke last week at the opening of a shelter for childre…
Read More…. 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 outpouring of emotion for more recognizable places—especially Notre Dame—is instructive. Samuel Johnson defined sympathy—or what we might now call “empathy”—as an “act of the imagination.” To put it less e…
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…e the People” should not be praying at all. This is not to say legislators cannot pray if they wish, they are free to do so. And they may pray to whichever gods care to listen and end their prayers with the verbal flourish or fetish of their choosing. But they should not do so with a government microphone, and not on the taxpayers’ time and dime. We’ve seen plenty of divisive prayers from the conservative side. Often deliberately so, wielding pray…
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…usaders and Islamic conquerors. In this context, rigid adherence to liturgical customs became a means by which to assert and preserve identity in the face of colonization and oppression. Conversely, adherence to Christian practices abandoned by the Christian West—if not in the Middle Ages then certainly by the early Modern Period—came to symbolize the backwardness and even barbarity of the Christian East and was used to place Eastern Christians an…
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…es Smit. Spears’s story is something many evangelical and formerly evangelical women can relate to. Her story is, as youth pastor Kelly Edmiston points out, “paradigmatic for so many women who feel trapped by the controls of the society and church in which she inhabits.” Edmiston goes on: “Ever since we blamed Eve…for eating the forbidden fruit, we have been trying to control her; suspicious of her capacity to manage her own life.” When you strip…
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