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‘Religious Freedom’ Rally Sets Stage for 1st Amendment Collision

By Sarah Posner

…peddled by the Catholic Bishops and their supporters. Nettina claimed the number of abortions increase with greater access to contraceptives, a trope commonly used to assert that contraception fails and therefore does not decrease the number of unintended pregnancies. This claim echoes statements made by the Bishops themselves, as well as anti-contraception groups, that birth control doesn’t work and is harmful to women’s health. Hagen recommende…

RD News Round-Up: October 27, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…Steenland and Chase Nordengren, “Over 37 million Americans live below the official poverty line, constituting a population larger than the 25 smallest states combined… One in eight Americans is poor. One child in six is poor. … From 2000 to 2007, the number of children living in poverty increased by 15 percent… In 2007, the richest 20 percent of Americans had over 50 percent of the nation’s income, while the poorest 20 percent had only 3.4 percen…

Creators of Missing Lowe’s Ad Tell All

By Hussein Rashid

…the world’s natural resources to drive around town, and turn on an obscene number of lights. Doesn’t this offend your morality? Or do you truly have no shame? PC: Riz gets to play all kinds of roles. I just play fat Indian guys. In fact, for my part in the Lowe’s ad, I was given food to eat between takes. The Christmas lights in the commercial were all LED, so: you’re welcome, Environment. Can I use plastic bags again now? RM: I was forced to take…

Does Multiverse Theory Bring Theology Into Science?

By Andrew Aghapour

…to explain the bounty or harmony of the world around us. Given an infinite number of universes, a few of them are bound to be life-friendly at some point, and we’re in one of them. The problem, of course, is that the price of getting rid of God is an infinite number of universes we can’t see. So sober-minded contemporary scientists end up on the same side as (some) theologians in arguing that the multiverse is extravagant, unnecessary, and unscien…

Rebuilding the Wall of Separation: A Progressive Discussion on Church & State

By Bruce Ledewitz

…s the framers were clearly not solely concerned with whether or not we had official federal or state churches, but first that the right of belief resided with individual citizens. The plumb line of this principle is clear. When Thomas Jefferson first proposed the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom in 1777, he stated that this right of individual conscience must be extended to everyone, including: “the Jew, the Mohametan, and the Hindoo.” Jeffer…

Conservative ‘Cafeteria Catholics’ Favor Opposition to Gay Marriage Over Health Care

By Paul Gorrell

…tribunals that allow these annulments. It’s important to realize that the official teaching on marriage in the Catholic Church has been written by men who have never been married. These men also teach that birth control can never be used by a married couple. Aside from the fact that much of the official teaching of the Church contradicts the understanding of healthy sexuality within the field of modern psychology, it is stunning that those whom t…

Bishops Release Religious Liberty Manifesto Vowing Disobedience to “Unjust Laws”

By Sarah Posner

…ol’s anti-discrimination policy, which the school denied, thus denying CLS official student organization status. In 2010, though, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the law school’s denial of official status to the group did not violate its free exercise rights. Yet the Bishops persist in claiming that this denial infringes on Christian student rights. As the ACLU’s Paul Cates noted when the case was pending before the Court in early 2010: If the co…

Will the Catholic Church Split?

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…ue, surely we may ask: is there any coherent opinion of the world in which official Catholic teaching on sexual ethics is not precisely one opinion among others? By any honest reckoning, that is in fact the state of things, no? One could certainly argue that the teaching of the magisterium (i.e. the pope and bishops) ought to be taken as authoritative. But in making that case, such a one would need to begin by acknowledging a range of opinions, of…

Death Couture: Not For Halloween Only

By Stephen Andes

…divine presence inhabits the physical world via material objects. Although official Church teaching mandates a separation between sign (i.e. icons, etc.) and signified (i.e. the divine presence), in practice the two often merge. Both Roman Catholic modernizers and Protestant iconoclasts have for the last four hundred years tried to stress the transcendence of God’s presence—the absolute separation between the material and spiritual in the here and…

Talmud on Trial: Interfaith Dialogue in the 13th Century

By Michael Schulson

…the best way to learn about another religion is to study its texts and its official positions. The Paris trial challenges both. Perhaps it’s best to encounter religions in the real world, informally, with a focus on actual actions, not official words. Pope Benedict XVI worked hard to improve the Church’s interfaith profile, with limited success. While his largely positive attitude toward other religions could not have been more different from that…