Religion Dispatches
…aders in Washington. Akin’s campaign, Lane said, represents the fight against establishment politicians, their consultants and “a morally flawed approach to politics.” It was part of the Pastors’ Policy Briefing, organized by the Missouri Renewal Project, a spin-off of an idea Lane first hatched in Texas, when pastors organized for Governor Rick Perry’s reelection in 2006. They’ve been active in several states since that time; Lane told me in 2008…
Read More…er of the church to file a lawsuit on its behalf: in 1993 he sued UCLA and Louis J. West, a professor of psychiatry and an expert in brainwashing and mind control. Majorski’s specific reasons for attacking the Celebrity Centre may never be known, but it’s clear that he blamed the Church for his problems—and he may have been right. The sad thing is that the attack isn’t remotely surprising. The Church of Scientology isn’t just attractive to mentall…
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…a provocative art critic, curator, and unapologetic modernist who devoted most of his professional life to the promotion of “the museum as a secular temple of art.” While the spiritual orientation of a great deal of modern Abstraction is widely recognized and widely appreciated, it was Brennan who suggested that there was a curatorial side to these ideas, one that had not been seen or explored. Certainly Kandinsky’s 1911 manifesto, Concerning the…
Read More…o hasn’t gotten the memo from Pope Francis that the culture wars are over, St. Louis Archbishop Robert Carlson is urging parishes in his diocese to cut ties with the Girl Scouts because the organization is “increasingly incompatible with Catholic values.” And what could members of the 100-year-old girls service organization be doing that has so alarmed Carlson? Are Brownies dissing Jesus by making Christmas trees out of old Reader’s Digests? Is so…
Read More…of support from lay Catholics, who stood with signs outside the meeting in St Louis showing their support. Franciscan Sr. Pat Farell instructed the sisters to be “fearless” in their response to the Vatican, and the end of her speech as she stepped down from her office was a phrase she learned in Chile during the Military dictatorship. “They can crush a few flowers, but they cannot hold back the springtime.” It is probably going to take a spring st…
Read More…ernment agency that enters a house of worship unwelcomed must be able to demonstrate a greater than usual reason for intrusion. In looking carefully at what happened in Ferguson, what is ethical must be considered every bit as important as what is legal. The police action in question here was allegedly justified as dealing with a zoning violation or some other minor infraction by the church – a rationale for intrusion into a house of worship that…
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…w priests have actually been defrocked. The European crisis is perhaps the most threatening to the political Church—the Church that claims statehood. Benedict is well aware that Europe is secular and far less deferential to the claims of special rights, and the freedom to disregard European laws it does not like. At the same time, the Church gets much more support from the European states than it does from America. In a number of countries, Cathol…
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…f John Law (1671-1729), though this Scotsman was, in rapid succession, the most famous, and then the most notorious, man in Europe. He was deemed France’s savior for a time, then fairly quickly condemned as the man who brought the once-proud nation to its knees. In all of this, Law’s story—one part morality play, and two parts farce—provides an interesting and illuminating lens through which to view the final weeks of the Bush presidency; doubly s…
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…the democratic undertaking. –The Eds.] By reminding us of a number of the most curious headline-stories spanning the previous twelve months, RD’s “2010: What Did We Believe In?” invites a range of emotional responses. My own reactions tended to the extremes: extreme worry at some of the crass and narcissistic excess of a great deal of contemporary American religiosity; but also extreme interest in, and even a whiff of hope inspired by, the relent…
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…racist views of African Americans. Of course, he denied he was a racist—as most racists do—even publishing an essay in 1987 in The Jewish Press, a Brooklyn-based weekly he edited, entitled “I Hate Racism.” By the early 1970s, Kahane and the JDL became embroiled in arms-smuggling and other illegal activities for which Kahane was found guilty and given a five-year suspended sentence. Kahane immigrated to Israel in 1971 but returned to the United Sta…
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