Religion Dispatches
…’s values are not Chicago values. They’re not respectful of our residents, our neighbors and our family members. And if you’re gonna be part of the Chicago community, you should reflect Chicago values.” (emphasis mine)…
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…er from playing a role in national elections scheduled for next year. Aung San Suu Kyi is the daughter of Burma’s national martyr and founder of the armed forces, Aung San, who was assassinated on the eve of his ascension to prime minister of an independent Burma. For much of her adult life, Aung San Suu Kyi lived and studied at Oxford University, where she raised a family. She entered politics in 1988, during the course of a popular uprising that…
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Adam Clayton Powell called it “cheap grace,” but we might call it “cheap atonement”: the effort by sinners to select which sins to acknowledge and repent. Pope Benedict XVI ended his heavily protested visit to England with a heartfelt apology for German bombings of England during the Battle of Britain; though he refused to accept Christian responsibility for the Holocaust, blaming it instead on pagans and atheists. Given that Cardinal Walter Kasp…
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…ated on Friday, 27 July, with police firing repeatedly into a crowd of thousands of workers at the viaduct near Halsted and 16th Streets. That Sunday, Protestant sanctuaries across the city rang with endorsements of law enforcement’s violent suppression of “the mob.” At one Methodist church the minister declared, “One of the worst features of the riot is, it did not cost enough human lives…Something like twenty fell under that first volley; it wer…
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…way from the hard work of repentance, who tickle our ears with promises of cheap grace, and offer a vision of the cross of Jesus that has nothing to say to the crosses, and lynching trees, of history. But, if we do, we will be settling for the gospel of Caesar, not the good news of Jesus Christ. Perhaps it is time to put down the chalk, stop drawing pyrotechnical conspiracy theories that play into our worst fears and listen, instead, for the diffi…
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…Nation of Islam’s “Angels of Death,” and eventually plotted to bomb select Chicago buildings and shoot down airplanes over the Chicago skies—though no resume should neglect the routine work of murder, extortion, and theft. Moorish Science? The authors of this book argue that the story of the Black P Stone Nation matters not merely because the Stones are an innovative criminal organization, not merely because the terrorism case against Fort stands…
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…inly cross over into antisemitism. But let us read Rosen carefully. Tzedek Chicago “opposes the very concept of an exclusively Jewish nation-state in historic Palestine.” Not against a “Jewish nation-state” but “an exclusively Jewish nation-state.” This isn’t a claim against the land of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people. In that regard “Jewish” could be attached to the nation-state that exists there. Just not exclusively, because it’s al…
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…z came to court accompanied by nuns who worked at the Archdiocese’s Centro San Juan Diego: Hispanic Institute for Family and Pastoral Care, where Hernandez had taught. The same month, the Birges discovered that Hernandez had been transferred to the Colorado Springs Diocese, where he had been named director of Christo Y Yo and was leading weekend retreats. (The Colorado Springs Archdiocese immediately let him go upon hearing about his history from…
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…been no clearance operations. Nevertheless, we are concerned to hear that numbers of Muslims are fleeing across the border to Bangladesh. We want to find out why this exodus is happening. As State Counsellor for her government, Aung San Suu Kyi’s words are, at the minimum, disturbing. In her speech, she cites several times Kofi Annan’s final report of the advisory commission on the Rakhine State. On the very first page of the introduction, the re…
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…the murder, and who was herself convicted in 1988 of conspiring to bomb a San Diego abortion clinic, Newman expressed bafflement that people might link anti-abortion activism with violence. He’s not the only one. “There is nothing on that flyer that is even remotely violent-prone,” Spirit One Christian Ministry’s leader, Mark Holick, a 52-year-old charismatic pastor, told me in a fast food restaurant in Wichita. While he acknowledged that distrib…
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