Religion Dispatches
…a vocal right-wing fringe movement (like Farage’s UKIP) that has limited access to political power than to have a quieter right-wing fringe movement that, by taking over a mainstream party, actually has a shot at national office. I suspect Clinton and her campaign made a good bet. Better to face things head on than to pretend they don’t exist, especially when so much is on the line. But the issue remains thorny. Faced with new, muscular expressio…
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…oncluded that there is more than one “intrinsic evil” in the world, a safe bet given the myriad challenges to human life abroad among us. He has said that Barack Obama will do a better job of operationalizing Catholic values than his opponent. Hardly defections from the anti-abortion camp, these respected scholars are simply broadening their definition of “pro-life” and moving toward a “seamless garment” view which allows for more than one issue t…
Read More…the housing bust. Many people may simply be postponing childbearing until better times return, and a few years of swift growth could produce a miniature baby boom. Good. Here we have actual people making decisions about childbearing, and in the process considering their own economic conditions. He goes on to say that “America has no real family policy to speak of at the moment, and the evidence from countries like Sweden and France suggests that…
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…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…
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…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…
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…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…
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…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…
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…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…ll, tax-paying citizens of the United States of America, you can damn well bet it is a civil rights movement. Nobody copyrighted the phrase, and nobody can, on one hand say, “Yes, we see that you’re being wronged,” and then say, “but you have no right to work for your civil rights, or to call it a ‘civil rights’ movement.” But the SBC certainly does want it both ways. They work in their “love the sinner, hate the sin” philosophy by being clear tha…
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