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The Meaning of Make Believe (Why Religion Doesn’t Have to Be “Real”)

By Neil Ellingson

…at me with the same scrunched, doubting brow my friends had on that canoe trip years before. And then a strange thing happened. After some time spent improvising my own idiosyncratic meditation practice incorporating a few tricks from Zen Buddhism as a means of accessing that more real place I had in the woods at night, I started to get curious about Christianity. Though first drawn, in solitary reading, to the more philosophical strands, in book…

Pope Francis Walks With LGBTQ People, One Step Forward, Big Steps Back

By Kaya Oakes

…Davis’ refusal to sign marriage licenses for same-sex couples. On the same trip, however, Francis also had a private meeting with his former student Yayo Grassi and Grassi’s boyfriend. In a video of the meeting, Francis recalls having previously met Grassi’s boyfriend in Rome and gives them both hugs and cheek kisses. The Vatican press office had to scramble yet again and emphasize that the meeting with Grassi was “in a spirit of kindness, welcome…

In Case You Missed Them, the Top Pope Francis Quotes of 2016

By Patricia Miller

…t then-GOP contender Donald Trump in February on his return from a six-day trip to Mexico, where he visited the U.S.-Mexico border. In response, Trump called Francis “disgraceful.” Avoiding pregnancy is not an absolute evil. In certain cases, as in this one, as in the one that I mentioned of Blessed Paul VI, it was clear. –On the same trip, Francis suggested that women could use contraception to avoid becoming infected with the Zika virus, which h…

From Original Sin to Flattering Mirror: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History

By Jeanne Theoharis

…itarism” and his legacy of sustained struggle shrank further into the background. At the same time, memorials to the civil rights movement became national events—from President Bill Clinton’s trip to Little Rock for the fortieth anniversary of the Little Rock Nine’s desegregation of Central High School, to Congress’s decision to have Rosa Parks’s coffin lie in honor in the Capitol, to the First Family’s trip to Selma, Alabama, on the fiftieth anni…

QAnon isn’t a Cult — a Problematic Term — But Michael Protzman’s Q-Adjacent ‘Negative48’ Certainly Is

By Thomas Lecaque

…their families to join Protzman in Dallas in November is STILL THERE. The number is certainly down from its height as many have stayed and cut off contact with their families. They recently took a road trip to Arizona to attend Trump’s rally, which garnered national attention with Protzman’s claim that Trump was really JFK Jr. in disguise. Protzman’s followers claimed that their seats meant Protzman had contacts with Trump, which renewed interest…

Putin Theo-Propaganda Minister Kirill Invokes 600 Years of History to Lay Claim to Ukraine — Here’s What it Means

By Katherine Kelaidis

…uthority over the Ukrainian Church disappears. In fact, without Jeremias’s trip, the argument could easily run in the other direction: i.e., that Moscow should be under the authority of Kyiv. Jeremias also deposed the existing metropolitan bishop of Kyiv and replaced him with a more friendly metropolitan. Well, it turns out the idea of Moscow as the center of secular and religious power in Eastern Europe was just as controversial in the 16th centu…

Alienating Even the Sadistic Trumpian Right, How Did Kristi Noem Miscalculate So Badly With Her Puppy Killing Story?

By Annika Brockschmidt

…ansported the family dog, an Irish Setter on top of a car during a 12-hour trip, scaring the dog, leaving it to have diarrhea—washing down the car and then continuing the trip with the terrified dog still strapped to the roof of the car. Incidentally, Romney refused to compare his scandal to Noem’s, declaring: “I didn’t shoot my dog. I loved my dog, and my dog loved me.” While other former presidential candidates like John Kerry and Barack Obama h…

Romney, Tisha B’Av, and LDS Temples

By Sarah Posner

…missed opportunity to begin rebuilding the Third Temple. For a far larger number of conservative Christians elsewhere in the world—and particularly in the United States—building that Temple is an essential condition of the Second Coming. And for many Muslims, any attempt to destroy the shrines of Al-Aqsa is a sign that the Hour is at hand. Romney is (however futilely) not only pandering for Jewish votes with this Israel trip, but he is also, I wo…

Updated: Dr. Oz Thinks Anti-Muslim’s Sugar-Daddy Sheldon Adelson is “Not So Bad”

By Garibaldi

…dissuade them from questioning, let alone accepting, an all expenses paid trip to Israel—even when that trip is paid for by one of the doyens of Islamophobia, Sheldon Adelson. But who can resist that old, smiley Casino tycoon you might ask? Not famed Turkish American Muslim Dr. Mehmet Oz! On the plane ride to Israel, none other than Rabbi Shmuley Boteach interviewed Dr. Oz for the Jerusalem Post. Asked why he chose to come to Israel Dr. Oz replie…

A Catholic Turnabout on Abortion or More Sympathy for the Bishops?

By Daniel C. Maguire

…ging “Catholic teaching at its root.” And there’s the rub. In place of the tripod of hierarchy, theologians, and sensus fidelism—which allows for mutual ongoing correction—Steinfels offers only the monopod of hierarchy. A trip through history to watch popes do such things as claim total authority over civil governments and deny the right to religious freedom would be chastening. (A read of John Julius Norwich’s Absolute Monarchs: A History of the…