Religion Dispatches
…feel the pain, the madness, that drove him to this desperate act? Can we truly suffer with him? The act of truly feeling compassion is hard work – and it’s work that we usually don’t see the point in doing. Why do I need to feel John Boehner’s pain? Why does an anti-gay person need to feel my pain? Why should we try to feel the pain of those without health insurance or without jobs? What good does that do? Doesn’t it just lead us further into des…
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…t the same time bypassing important parallels that we still confront and struggle with today. We made this choice to open a conversation about how one reconciles faith with the realities of the world—whether in ancient Israel or in the contemporary U.S. We assumed we might be met with some resistance from Biblical literalists, as there is always the chance when dealing with religious material that faith-based audiences might negatively react to ou…
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…pital. Yet, these post-industrial theologies rest on assumptions about the world that reify the socioeconomic structures behind the current economic crisis. Workplace spirituality imagines a future where businesses benevolently guide us toward peace, prosperity, and spiritual vitality; managers become therapeutic purveyors of spiritual wisdom and for-profit firms act as the ultimate arbiters of the social order. Still, when the former COO of Wal-M…
Read More…mov, is a holdover from the Soviet era. He is also easily one of the most brutal rulers in the world, and his regime is known for huge human rights violations. But nevertheless, because of its size, population, and a land boundary with Afghanistan, the Obama administration is making a deal with the devil, trying to shift more of our war effort through this country instead of Pakistan. Unfortunately the war to give Afghanistan a more enlightened go…
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…ave provided is a key for pope-watchers on all sides of the political spectrum to read the style, the attitude, the “how” of Francis’ papacy. As this Jesuit’s sense of self in the world continues to unfold, it will be critical for anyone who wishes to engage the man to be attuned to the processes through which he has come to know himself. Understanding these terms might well provide a source from which persuasive power can be drawn. The specifics…
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…k cousin who shows up at the dinner to which you’ve happened to bring your newest love. He’s embarrassing. He’s humiliating. And your new squeeze has to wonder if that particular kind of hate-filled crazy is somewhere in your gene pool. “How exactly are you related to him?” she asks. By week’s end, the tweeting pontiff, Benedict XVI, however, was offering a more temperate call to social media participation in his most recent message to the Roman C…
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…arismatic people can project. One can’t help but be impressed by how Coe struck everyone as the real deal, as God’s true messenger, even as he was carefully developing the most pernicious example of fake Christianity the world has ever seen. To be clear, I don’t mean “fake” in the sense that certain people (ahem) mean it in characterizing things they don’t agree with. I mean “fake” in the sense that the Rev. Eric Williams, who appears in the minis…
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…of patriarchs who fear the loss of their power, the revelation of their corruption on clergy sexual abuse and its coverup, and an end to their dubious financial dealing, have aborted the Catholic community’s full potential to take on the current climate catastrophe in any credible and effective way. I’m not arguing that the full equal participation of all Catholics of whatever gender or marital status in their own church will heal the planet. But…
Read More…logy. More than 20 years ago, sociologist Robert Wuthnow’s classic The Restructuring of American Religion posited that education, mobility, and socioeconomic factors were trumping theological differences among American Protestant denominations. Some took Wuthnow’s argument as proof text for the culture war, but it also explains the softening of theological boundaries among the mainline and the triumph of pragmatics (shrinking budgets) over dogmati…
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…Church after 20 centuries of life.” As James Carroll recently wrote in the New Yorker, Vatican II was “an historic reversal of the Church’s panicked nineteenth-century repudiation” of the encroaching modern world. As such, it represented the church’s embrace of “pluralism, the separation of church and state, the primacy of conscience, the preference of experience over dogma, and—for that matter—freedom of the press.” But according to Weigel’s revi…
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