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Reading Beinart and Lerner as Gaza Burns

…is debated in nearly every institutional Jewish setting is an enormous transformation of Jewish life. That’s why I feel so optimistic. Jews Are Now the Powerful Masters How and why this transformation happened will be grist for historians’ mills for a long time to come. We’re still too close to its beginnings for historians, or anyone else, to explain it very well. The best we can do is begin to map out the territory. One way to begin mapping any…

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Colorado’s Personhood Initiative Fails—For Now

…” But if bearing her rapist’s child would just make her literally lose her sanity, say? Or if her pregnancy will invite further abuse from the male relative already abusing her? Well, then we’re evidently back to weighing the innocence of the fetus with the guilt of the father, with nary a consideration for the woman.  To be sure, neither rape exceptions nor life-of-the-mother exceptions really make a lot of sense if you truly think that a fertili…

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My God, David Brooks

…or, secularity does not connote the erosion of religion as much as the transformation of Western attitudes toward, and definitions of, the religious. Religion becomes an opportunity to express our true selves, our freedom, our choice. Spirituality, well-chosen, amounts to a state of world-transformative longing. The opposite of tradition, so called. But whereas Taylor ruminates on our remarkable situation of having a choice to be religious or not…

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US Archbishop and Vatican-Appointed “Overseer” Attends Annual Meeting of Women Religious

…embly, the sisters officially called for gun control legislation and signed 800 postcards demanding Congress members to pass immigration reform. As LCWR past-president, Sr. Pat Farrell said to the Assembly, “Expressing what we really think and feel, with transparency and vulnerability, is for the brave of heart. It is, however, what we are being asked to do in our current conflict. All of a sudden the world is looking to us.”  Like this story? You…

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Policing Academic Freedom: A Book, a Controversy, and the Ominous Aftermath

….” The school teacher was Mr. Batra, a member of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a right-wing Hindu nationalist organization. As early as 2001, Mr. Batra has engaged in political and legal measures to affect educational curriculum through his organization Shiksha Bachao Aandolan Samiti (Movement to Save Education). For Mr. Batra, Doniger’s malicious act was her portrayal of a history of Hindus replete with eroticism, women, and unorthodox v…

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Are Atheists Taking 1st Amendment Suits Too Far?

While sanctimonious conservatives and godless liberals alike await the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Hobby Lobby case, two more suits with serious church and state implications are quietly making their way through the system. The Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) is a group of “atheists, agnostics and skeptics” with a Scientology-esque fondness for litigation. Recently the FFRF has gone after the so-called “parsonage exemption,” which allow…

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Did the Pope Embrace the Prosperity Gospel?

Late last month, Pope Francis met with charismatic Christian and Pentecostal leaders at the Vatican, including prosperity gospel televangelist Kenneth Copeland, a popular American religious figure whose theology and lifestyle is directly at odds with the Pope’s. The meeting was not the humble Pope’s first encounter with the self-anointed bishops of bling. In February, he recorded a video message for a Copeland conference, in which he called for u…

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Catholic Church Ordained Women Before, Can Do it Again

…e trajectory of deacon-priest-bishop is relatively recent—only about 700 or 800 years in the long history of the Church. In fact, the earlier understanding is that the deacon would become a bishop! I sometimes wonder if the naysayers are more afraid of women bishops than of women priests. But, in modern times, we have reestablished the tradition of a diaconate lived permanently. All priests are also ordained deacons, and in the most formal of litu…

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The Intellectual Source Code For National Conservatism Can Be Found at This Niche Catholic Publication

…e, as it were) is Catholic natural law moral philosophy. Natural law is the 800-year-old Thomist tradition that absorbs (from revelation and scripture) and communicates (into public discourse and legal practice) a quite specific understanding of the human individual as the summit of God’s creation. First Things has hosted some of the most important debates and produced some of the most fruitful arguments in support of National Conservatism, the in…

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The Best-Laid Plans of Mice and Humans

…ill go to Mina, etc. There is still no address for the hotels, but a local phone number. There is also information about processing customs at Jeddah, meeting the tour guide, and information that says “the group” will proceed to Makkah—which means the first will have to wait for the last person, which is the beginning of feeling like you are a group. They even include suggestions to “get to know” your fellow travelers. I still had no idea what wer…

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