Religion Dispatches
…s just as wrong.” While I do not doubt that there are certain similarities between apartheid (as well as US segregation) and the exclusion of women from Roman Catholic ordination, and while I can believe that Fresen’s feelings about these two injustices are similar, it is not ethically acceptable to say that they are “just the same.” Candor requires me to admit that I heard Fresen make much the same argument at a 2005 conference in Philadelphia ma…
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…since the clergy are in disrepute, include women who support reproductive freedom. When nuns help pregnant people get needed medical care, they can expect negative consequences from hierarchs. Medical workers are in a bind when they work in Catholic facilities that do not permit them to practice as they see fit. I suspect ecclesial disobedience is in many Catholics’ futures. Weigh these risks against one young girl who’s forced to give birth agai…
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…aim total authority over civil governments and deny the right to religious freedom would be chastening. (A read of John Julius Norwich’s Absolute Monarchs: A History of the Papacy would likewise tame even the most extreme papal fever.) Steinfels faults O’Brien for his “minimization of the moral status of the unborn but developing human lives”—i.e. fetuses. Fetuses have moral status but their value does not trump all other values. Giving fetuses ab…
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…,” the monk said quietly. One of my students had stopped the brown-cloaked Dominican as he strode across the plaza of the Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome. We had just been reenacting Galileo’s trial just feet from where some of this monk’s brethren had presided over it around 380 years ago. My student wanted to know what this 21st-century monk thought about the whole thing. Just this summer, Florence reopened its history of science m…
Read More…d whose murder was attributed to the local Jewish community by a fanatical Dominican monk. Soon though, stories of “blood libel” became divorced from even the most rudimentary burden of proof or narrative complexity. “BloodlLibel” became simply common knowledge; it was “what Jews do,” just as surely as witches steal penises and sacrifice babies to Satan. Just as in Trump’s world, American women wrap newborn babies beautifully, rock them briefly, a…
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…king up of faith, or worse, in the wrong hands, faith bashing. Nietzsche gave us philosophy with a hammer—though what is more often needed in the classroom is a screwdriver. To profess religion in the classroom (or in publications) is to play the artist, to navigate a thread between the traditional and the new, between critique and commendation; to find the DMZ between the inside and outside, inviting students into that uncomfortable space. Our ve…
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…ive minutes on the agenda of their November 2021 meeting to discuss what’s promoted as the most life-changing process for the Catholic community worldwide since Vatican II. There is a deep disconnect here between rhetoric and reality. Many bishops, especially the most conservative, are simply ignoring or, it is rumored, dissing the whole thing, perhaps considering it more of Francis’ folly. Others are mounting middling efforts. Still others are gi…
Read More…rtion or same-sex marriage banning, is going to bring back their jobs. They’re culturally alienated from the Democratic Party, with it’s tilt toward educated, urban elites and people of color. That leaves Trump as their last and best bet. And as the primary contests move into the Rust Belt and Northeast, this Catholic base may turn out to be Trump’s secret weapon, exploding the elite Catholic neocon-evangelical alliance that has dominated the Repu…
Read More…r difference within the precincts of our hearts and minds. But the tension between our mainstream self-presentation—the blonde Ken-doll phenotype many ascribe to ethnic Mormons (descended from 19th-century English and Scandinavian emigrants), our conservative politics, the carefully crafted and highly standardized language Mormons learn to use to both protect our beliefs and describe them to non-Mormons—and the radical innovativeness of Mormon bel…
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…ked to Silvan Shalom, Israel’s foreign minister, that the new museum would promote tolerance “just as building health clubs promoted health.” This was not the first time that the Wiesenthal Center and the LA Museum of Tolerance formulated its own foreign policy; and in doing so implied that they were speaking for the American Jewish community at large. The center endorsed enthusiastically the Bush administration’s Iraq War, and in 2006 it dubbed V…
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