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Will Religion Finally Give Peace a Chance? Rising to the Challenge of Nonviolence as Armageddon Looms

By Peter Laarman

…iar to need detailing by me. A few keywords will suffice: climate, Covid, cruelty, corruption, and excessive cravenness among many in leadership whom we would like to admire more than we do. My friends at RD know that I struggle over what to say in the face of the unending shit. They also know that I never stop trying to process what this moment might be about. I am no Candide, and I can offer none of the holiday treacle you might get from, say, a…

American Nuns Under the Vatican Microscope

By Mary E. Hunt

…t materials from the investigators have shown, an entrée to looking at the lives, beliefs, and practices of women who strive to live coherently, melding their religious convictions with the needs of the world. Whether there are three nuns or three million is not the issue. What has changed (and the Vatican wishes hadn’t) is the fact that Catholic women, including nuns, think and act on their own without relying on male authorities to tell them how…

Gays Are Oppressing Christian Florists, and Other Dishonest Arguments

By Eric C. Miller

…tant matters of sexuality can co-exist alongside gay persons who desire to live free lives as well. History reveals that when one group gains cultural favor over another, it typically overreaches, going to extremes to mercilessly subjugate their enemies to whatever table scraps are left over. That’s the phase we’re in now. In these circumstances, détente is discarded. Instead, embattlement and entrenchment passes on to the next generation. It is t…

How to Become an Atheist in Twelve Short Months

By Hollis Phelps

…he work has just begun. How we reshape or build the narratives by which to live our lives is the most interesting part of our work as human beings. My work to end homelessness, my interest in the crises facing our democracy and our ecosystem—these are the interesting aspects of my life and work. At least, I’d like to think so.” I suspect that there are many former believers out there who feel similarly. Perhaps they call themselves atheists, perha…

Call Me Pesach

By Peter Manseau

…religion Lenny Bruce once said, “Even if you are Catholic, if you live in New York you’re Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you are going to be goyish even if you are Jewish.” During a week of religious collision that once meant trouble, it is hopeful that the names Catholics and Jews once called each other may soon be as forgotten as Yoshke Pan Drek. In the meantime, even a goy a called Pesach can be pleased to live at time when holy days i…

Greatest Hits of 2015: Religion Stories Our Readers Couldn’t Resist

By Ellie Faustino

…simply tragic figures, they are harbingers of great things to come.” The “new world of universal transparency” that has been created in the digital information age certainly poses a new set of challenges to religious institutions, and Dennett offers his predictions as to how religions will fare in the future. #9 Fighting Fire with Ire: 3 Lessons from Noam Chomsky’s Takedown of Sam Harris In May, New Atheist Sam Harris launched an offensive agains…

Healed of the Sin of Religion: At Church with Sara Miles

By Lisa Webster

…nderstand that people want to feel at home. You live in capitalism, to be crude about it; you live in a hard place, and you want a place that feels authentic and real and where you can be yourself. But what I see over and over again is this inability to tell the difference between tradition and nostalgia. And so, whereas I think there’s incredible power in trying to recuperate tradition and reflect on it and consciously appropriate it, there’s als…

Newtown Tragedy: The Horror of No Future

By Jodi Eichler-Levine

…s his daughter. No angel stays his hand. We remember child martyrs in the crusades, young Holocaust victims like Anne Frank, the deaths of Emmett Till and four little girls in Birmingham, Alabama. The children of the day care center in Oklahoma City. Our enduring image from that dark day is a fireman, soaked in blood, carrying a baby on the cover of the magazines. Youth move us because they bring to the light the existential horror of no future. K…

Chicago Synagogue Excoriated For Shift From ‘Non’ to ‘Anti’ Zionism — Maybe the Problem isn’t the ‘Anti’ But the ‘Zionism’

By Shaul Magid

…n that non-Orthodox Judaism is a distortion. One could argue that half the world’s Jews live in Israel. This is true. But the other half live in the diaspora and one regularly hears Israelis say that there’s no future for Jews in the diaspora (in Zionist nomenclature, “negation of the diaspora”) and they’re not viewed as the enemy of the Jews. What one is anti about when one defines oneself as anti-Zionist is a good question. In some cases, if it…

Lila Rose Targets Planned Parenthood with Lies

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…f it[.]” (Humanae Vitae II.14) Awkward. Now, that’s not to say that all of Live Action’s employees are Catholic. They aren’t. And it’s not as though Catholic teaching hasn’t addressed scenarios in which telling the truth causes evil—the Nazis-at-the-door scenario, for example. Catholic teaching includes the doctrine of “mental reservation”: a kind of equivocation wherein someone says something which is deliberately misleading, ambiguous, confusing…