Lifestyles of the Rich and Pious
…dinal and Francis ally Sean O’Malley over for the weekend. The Franciscan lives in a “rundown rectory” in Boston’s South End. I bet he would love the hot tub….
Read More…dinal and Francis ally Sean O’Malley over for the weekend. The Franciscan lives in a “rundown rectory” in Boston’s South End. I bet he would love the hot tub….
Read More…d is, “Would you go to church every week if you had the opportunity?” I’ll bet his numbers would have been much higher for gays and lesbians who desire to go to church but are unable to find a welcoming pew. All in all, I’m grateful for Barna even wandering into the subject of gay and lesbian religious belief. I think his study is important and can go a long way to dispelling the old “gays vs. God” dichotomy that too often gets played out in the m…
Read More…s videos about Entebbe and memories of Munich in 1972 accompanied the alef-bet. In the way that both children and adults sometimes do, I took the car as a sign that we were not safe because we were different. As Jay Michaelson argues, we can “recognize millennial thinking in our own minds,” and mine seemed to always expect—briefly, quite irrationally—an undoing of the world. I imagined armed men entering the quiet sanctuary, always marking the nea…
Read More…d. What does this mean in real life? Traditionally, there is a distinction between a medical procedure such as removal of the uterus of pregnant woman if it is cancerous or of the fallopian tube if there is an ectopic pregnancy and other life-saving abortions such as an abortion if the woman has heart disease, renal failure, or as in the Brazilian case, the woman’s health or physical condition makes carrying the pregnancy to term likely to led to…
Read More…olic terms, are not. Imagine a similar discussion of the masculine body. I bet the mere suggestion of penis enlargements as a moral issue for men would stop more conversations than it would start. Try a simple substitute of ‘masculine’ for ‘feminine’ in this section of the document: Plastic surgery that is not medico-therapeutic can be aggressive toward the masculine identity, showing a refusal of the body in as much as it is a refusal of the ‘sea…
Read More…u say, ‘Well, that’s not so!’ You try to be polite, but people should know better,” he told me once as we discussed what he called “wrong ideas about God.” “Christ is not an idea. Christ is a person. But ideas about him are very important. If you have a wrong idea, that stops your growth in God,” he said. “People within the church should know better and just are ignorant of the facts, no matter what you think about them. That puzzles me.” We had o…
Read More…he fate of the nation’s first major party presidential candidate. But I’ll bet you a twelve pack of caffeine-free Diet Coke and a dozen pink-frosted sugar cookies that there is no anti-Mormon phonebanking script in use by Catholics for Obama. Anywhere. Is anti-Mormonism real? Yes. But even if one poorly-trained rogue phonebanker veered off script into an anti-Mormon ad lib, it does not make for a concerted anti-Mormon effort. (Leave that to ortho…
Read More…) to potentially controversial (adoption and LGBT issues). But it’s a safe bet this community didn’t expect a “best blog” competition to devolve into a witch hunt—literally. The “Faith Blog” category seemed dominated by homeschooling, “Biblical Womanhood,” “Biblical Patriarchy,” and so-called family values moms, and who apparently thought they own the category of faith (though Circle of Moms doesn’t exhibit any signs of being explicitly religious)…
Read More…nt of the total number of the members mentioned in articles V and VIII. Despite this, Douthat assures us that “as a Catholic,” he expects “the plot to ultimately fail; where the pope and the historic faith seem to be in tension, my bet is on the faith.” It’s a measure of how deeply conservative Catholics identify the “faith” with the doctrinal orthodoxy of JP II and Benedict that Douthat actually believes he speaks for Catholics more authentically…
Read More…ant measure? Is this not God’s “gracious good will” (Jonathan Edwards, you bet)? I digress, but only slightly. Here I am having a kind of dialogue with myself about work as blessing, not punishment; but this is the desperately-needed dialogue we are not having in the culture at large or even within US religious communities. I mean, think about it. Our president is a “socialist” because he thinks there might be something wrong with letting 50 milli…
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