Religion Dispatches
…I have serious doubts that the GOP will nominate a woman at the top of the ticket. Perry, on the other hand, is emerging as a favorite of the Tea Party, demonstrating his appeal to both the Christian right and its associated tax-slashing zealots. At first blush, history, if not God, appears to be on Perry’s side: Texas, after all, has been the place where GOP presidents are made by the religious right. In 1979, as Huckabee recounts in his book, hi…
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…oil fields of Texas, but as a patriotic graduate I joined the military, my ticket out of Louisiana and an opportunity to explore the world. In my fourth year, having become a naval officer, I volunteered for shore duty in Vietnam which would become a turning point in my life. Never had I experienced such violence, suffering, and fear. In the madness of war, my faith became more important and I felt God was calling me to be a priest. I talked to a…
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…Joe Biden impersonation can’t compensate for this defect at the top of the ticket. No number of morally-impassioned surrogates can compensate. We should not forget that a widely-shared yearning for a moral revolution formed the heart of the Sanders movement. We shouldn’t forget that this surge of moral energy surprised the Vermont senator himself, or that it was really a remarkable thing to behold, especially considering the many liabilities of th…
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…ecause he was pro-life. It was because refused to endorse the Clinton-Gore ticket. There have been many pro-life speakers at Democratic conventions in the intervening years, including last night Robert P. Casey, Jr., himself no slouch in the pro-life department. Good Catholics Can’t Be Democrats, 2 Or so says Bishop Tobin of Providence about Tim Kaine. I did not know that supporting the ordination of women was a “grave sin” demanding excommunicati…
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…rian history, with more splits and divorces than those in a Trump-Gingrich ticket). Put more simply, most large evangelical denominations effectively have a blue church/red church divide. The schism was also a direct result of resistance from various churches in the 1960s to being told by Presbyterian leadership to admit African Americans into their congregations. The story here—focusing on Memphis as a case study—is told in gripping detail in Ste…
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…tched around several city blocks, districts that were used to double-digit numbers were overwhelmed with thousands of participants, and the vast majority were adamant Sanders supporters. The night was unprecedented in the modern Mormon world. https://twitter.com/sltrib/status/710953531021221888 Close observers expected the “Mormon Vote” to go Sanders’s way—the latest polling had him up eight points, Sanders held huge rallies in both states, and Hi…
Read More…candidate. Reacting to a possible Cruz nomination, the 92 year-old Dole this week warned of “cataclysmic” losses for the GOP with the “extremist” Senator at the top of the ticket. But which of the other candidates could get realistically get the nomination? “I think it’s Trump,” said Dole. …
Read More…ially vulnerable,” but most will still “have to wait about two years for a ticket out of Turkey.” But to an individual, those two years can feel like an eternity. Refugees are generally barred from working and often survive doing back-breaking black-market labor or sex work. One sign of how at risk they feel is that all of those who spoke to BuzzFeed News for this story asked to be identified by their first names or nicknames. Many — especially tr…
Read More…Listen to a podcast of the Ticket 2016, during which I talked about religion in the 2016 presidential campaign with Austin, Texas NPR affiliate KUT’s Ben Philpott and the Texas Tribune’s Jay Root:…
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…to continue to shrink into the insularity and disorganization that caused the Philadelphia Archdiocese to decline so precipitously? It remains to be seen. Meanwhile, faithful Catholics and others who want to see the Pope may be losing heart. 10,000 tickets for the Pope’s Speech at Independence Mall sold out in two minutes on Tuesday, with 394k people trying their best to get a few. Tickets are already being scalped at $100 and up on craigslist. I…
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