Religion Dispatches
…versary of Kennedy’s speech, Archbishop Charles Chaput, then Archbishop of Denver and now Archbishop of Philadelphia, returned to Houston and gave his own speech at Houston Baptist University. There, Chaput accused Kennedy of giving a speech that “profoundly undermined the place not just of Catholics, but of all religious believers, in America’s public life and political conversation. Today, half a century later, we’re paying for the damage.” Toda…
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…hristian [Right]” school board victories—a favorite tactic of the Right—in Denver, Colorado Springs, and Dallas, and calls on believers to “find anyone in church that’s not registered to vote, register them to vote and get them to vote their biblical values,” claiming that church mobilizations, and efforts by groups like Moms for Liberty, were key to these local victories. Pastor Jentezen Franklin, Senior Pastor at Free Chapel, based in Georgia, e…
Read More…Ryder Cup team is chock full of born-again Christian golfers. In football, Denver Broncos rookie quarterback Tim Tebow has been labled a “hyper-Christian” by Rolling Stone. A feature in this month’s issue, written by Matt Taibbi, nicknames Tebow “Kid Jesus.” A pair of Muslims from New York spent every night of Ramadan in a different mosque in a different state on what they called a “Ramadan Roadtrip.” A group of vengeful Oklahoma City atheists,…
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…e rally-goers, and it also urged attendees to bring food donations for the Denver Rescue Mission. At the rally itself, there was no sustained talk about the spiritual or political effects of the global financial crisis, but there was a call to support something called the Hatikvah Project, which works to alleviate poverty among Messianic Jews in Israel (who, we were told, are poor because their families and nation reject them as apostates). Americ…
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…w to this fight, having contested statute of limitations laws as Bishop of Denver. He knows exactly what he’s saying. Not going back in Philadelphia means not opening up more litigation in an Archdiocese that has been broken by sexual abuse, two grand jury investigations, and the first Catholic administrator sent to jail for child endangerment by pedophile priests. Not going back means that even though the Archdiocese just settled with “Billy Doe”…
Read More…ic Policy Center’s George Weigel calls, in a column for the Archdiocese of Denver, “Catholicism’s anti-statist social justice principle, subsidiarity.” As Dan Maguire explains, subsidiarity “means that nothing should be done by a higher authority that can be done by active participation at lower levels. Right-wingers like Paul Ryan grab that one word, ‘subsidiarity,’ and claim it supports their maniacal hatred of government. It doesn’t.” Ryan’s t…
Read More…form of protest. At the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, University of Denver political scientist Joshua Wilson argues that even if the Supreme Court strikes down the law, blockades and protests of the types that led to the passage of these laws are not likely to return. That’s because, Wilson argues, since the late 1990s clinic protests have dropped off, replaced with savvy lobbying and advocacy in state capitals, a sophisticated legal strate…
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…em into buildings in Baghdad and Riyadh. In retaliation, the Arabs capture Denver and shoot up the surrounding countryside, but after failing to locate the terrorist mastermind, they decide to open a second front in the now global War on Terror. The obvious target would be the Evangelical Republic of Texas, which supplied the hijackers with their passports, but Texas is a member of OPEC and an Arabian ally, so instead President Bandar decides to i…
Read More…ill not receive reimbursement for those services? As the district court in Denver found in denying Little Sisters’ request for a preliminary injunction, the plaintiffs in the case “ignore the fact that, as participants in a church plan, they fall outside the [government’s] current enforcement authority.” The district court, in its ruling four days before the regulations went into effect, noted that “[p]laintiffs would have the court surmise that t…
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…s about the more narrow scope of active Facebook affiliations, despite the number of “friends” a person’s profile page might boast. With regard to churches, Beck reads the data as suggesting that Facebook and other social media are replacing what he believes is the “main draw of the traditional church: social connection and affiliation.” It’s an engaging argument. Beck is certainly right that church is no longer a central gathering place for the m…
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