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Synod or Sin Oddly: Vatican Encourages Catholics to ‘Walk Together’ as Long as the Hierarchy Leads the Way and Decides the Route

…ive minutes on the agenda of their November 2021 meeting to discuss what’s promoted as the most life-changing process for the Catholic community worldwide since Vatican II. There is a deep disconnect here between rhetoric and reality. Many bishops, especially the most conservative, are simply ignoring or, it is rumored, dissing the whole thing, perhaps considering it more of Francis’ folly. Others are mounting middling efforts. Still others are gi…

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Museum of (In)tolerance for Divided City

…ked to Silvan Shalom, Israel’s foreign minister, that the new museum would promote tolerance “just as building health clubs promoted health.” This was not the first time that the Wiesenthal Center and the LA Museum of Tolerance formulated its own foreign policy; and in doing so implied that they were speaking for the American Jewish community at large. The center endorsed enthusiastically the Bush administration’s Iraq War, and in 2006 it dubbed V…

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Are Social Issues Non-Issues?

…are moral issues. His sense of economic morality, though, forged somewhere between focus groups and Ayn Rand, is very different from the one most Americans share. Obama could have taken up this claim, and articulated a different economic-moral vision, one in which the top wage-earners pay their share, and in which health care is not predicated on the right insurance bet. This could have been a worthwhile ethical exchange, undermining the too-neat…

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Expelled: Christian Student Claims Discrimination, But Judge Says No

…ntended she violated school policy and the American Counseling Association code of ethics. That code, by the way, is clear about what is expected from counselors: Counselors do not condone or engage in discrimination based on age, culture, disability, ethnicity, race, religion/spirituality, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, marital status/partnership, language preference, socioeconomic status, or any basis proscribed by law. Counselors…

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Vaccine Mandates are Constitutional; Religious Exemptions are Unnecessary and Harmful

…emptions are not constitutionally required. People are fond of saying that freedom isn’t free, but nor is it absolute. And thinking in constitutional absolutes is killing Americans. Literally. The claim that the Second Amendment protects a sacred and unlimited right is a legal narrative recently invented, deliberately advanced, and grossly manipulated by the NRA—and it’s killing Americans. The Supreme Court’s political manipulation of the constitu…

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I Am Better than Him

…ns them the place better than others who make different choices. So, it is better for not better than. I mean, do what makes you better for yourself, but do not confuse it with something that makes you better than another self; which is istikbar. The story of Satan goes like this: when the prototype (or first) human, Adam, was created out of an atom of dust (tin, pronounced “teen”) the unseen creatures were ordered to bow to him. There was a reaso…

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Is Refusal to Write Anti-Gay Cake Message a Violation of Religious Freedom?

…herself actually identifies as Christian, so in some sense it’s a conflict between two types of Christianity (the baker might be in better shape if she filed suit for an injunction from a court protecting her from the Colorado administrative process on the grounds that NOT baking a homophobic cake is part of her religious exercise). But lets say the baker was irreligious. To her, homophobia might be a political or moral issue—but to the customer,…

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Cues for Throwing Up

…ft: evangelical activists do not want to hear that the White House will be free of religious influence; in fact, a White House free of religious influence (conservative religious influence, that is) is something to be reviled, indeed provoking reverse peristalsis. Hence the new ecumenism found in manifestos like the Manhattan Declaration, which appears as a blueprint for the “religious freedom” wars, and in the opposition to the HHS contraception…

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Supreme Court to Hear Hobby Lobby, Conestoga Cases

…e free speech cases, the plaintiffs have argued that the separation of the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses by a semicolon requires that the two clauses be interpreted, for these purposes, identically. (Filmmaker Drew Emery calls the upcoming Supreme Court case “the world’s most closely watched semicolonoscopy.”) In Conestoga, though, the Third Circuit rejected those arguments. “We are not persuaded that the use of a semi-colon means that eac…

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Rent-Free Religion in New York’s Public Schools

…granted permits for worship services. The new churches valued not just the free real estate, but also the proximity to children and families, and the credibility provided by their new physical setting. Owing to the fact that schools are generally available to the community only on Sundays, not Fridays or Saturdays, the opportunity was not open in any significant way to Muslim or Jewish congregations. “We have been enjoying meeting in the school th…

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