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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

By Mary E. Hunt

…lk on beautifully groomed paths. They will stroll along and glide into the best seats. Most women, LGBTIQ+ people, divorced and remarried Catholics, and other persons may be on the same path but with enormous boulders, even mountains in their way. And most people will have neither time, energy, health, nor inclination to step a foot along a path they do not choose, to a destination they cannot pick, with people who do not stop long enough to bid t…

Václav Havel: Democracy as Spiritual Discipline

By Peter Montgomery

…osing means that contradict the ends. As we know from history, that is the best way to eliminate the very ends we set out to achieve. In other words, if there is to be any chance at all of success, there is only one way to strive for decency, reason, responsibility, sincerity, civility, and tolerance, and that is decently, reasonably, responsibly, sincerely, civilly, and tolerantly. I’m aware that, in everyday politics, that is not seen as the mo…

First Congregational UCC, Ripon Wisconsin

Cheese State Reality Check: On The Wisconsin Idea and the Social Gospel

By Daniel Schultz

…on works in Bascom Hall, and the Bascom dairy on campus sells probably the best ice cream in the state. Likewise Charles Van Hise, the long-serving president of the UW is remembered with a hall where generations of students have studied foreign languages. People outside of Badgerland might be more familiar with Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, founder of the Progressive Party in the early 20th century, and still today an inspiration to lefties. E…

Catholic Healthcare Is Not the Enemy

By Frances Kissling

…rarchy—and increasingly the Catholic health care system—advocates do their best to make the other look as bad as possible, interpreting all events through a glass darkly. (In both cases, curiously, the two ‘demons’ are actually very popular; Planned Parenthood admired as an early advocate of family planning for low income women, and the Catholic health care system for the “sisters” who cared for the poor.) In the case of Planned Parenthood, anti-c…

On Death and After-Death

By Amina Wadud

…ode. That is, if you’ve led a good life, done the rights things, tried you best, etc., you’ll get heaven. If not, well; you know what happens then. Now stories about Nakir and Munkar get interesting. So much so that some will even tell you the “questions” that they will ask and what answers are correct! I think that is a stretch, but again, for my purposes here, this is all gender-neutral or gender-inclusive, even in the lore and literature, imagi…

We May Be Sacrificing Our Children to the God of the Gun — But it’s Not That the God Requires the Deaths

By Stephanie Frank

…ur Moloch,” written just after the Newtown murders nearly a decade ago, is best understood. He wrote, That horror [of the Sandy Hook shootings] cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. Th…

Talmud on Trial: Interfaith Dialogue in the 13th Century

By Michael Schulson

…and its official positions. The Paris trial challenges both. Perhaps it’s best to encounter religions in the real world, informally, with a focus on actual actions, not official words. Pope Benedict XVI worked hard to improve the Church’s interfaith profile, with limited success. While his largely positive attitude toward other religions could not have been more different from that of the 13th century church, Benedict’s basic approach was the sam…

“Ex-Gay” Common Ground More of a Killing Ground

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…point is that people can leave whatever it is that God calls less than His best and move into something that is His best, becoming more like He is. Honestly, this isn’t news. So-called “ex-gay ministries” have long given up the promise of turning homosexuals into heterosexuals. True, some who say they’ve “left homosexuality” have married opposite gender partners and had children. Here we can begin the long argument over Alfred Kinsey and his conti…

A ‘Pro-Life’ Buttigieg Ambush, Trump’s Corrupt Counsel, and More

By Daniel Schultz

…e, and I believe that a woman ought to be able to make that decision. “The best I can offer is that if we can’t agree on where to draw the line, the next best thing we can do is agree on who should draw the line. And in my view, it’s the woman who’s faced with that decision in her own life.” His response was quickly memed and circulated by his campaign on social media, where some described Ms. Day’s engagement with the candidate as an ambush of Mr…

A Recent Local Controversy Reveals the Theocratic Heart of ‘Project Blitz’

By Frederick Clarkson

…enerally referred to as a Christian nationalist, largely because he is the best-known promoter of the idea. But as a former vice chair of the Texas Republican Party and a frequent headliner at Christian right and Republican conclaves, he is also a Dominionist with considerable political reach. (The Jefferson Lies was on the New York Times best-seller list at the time it was withdrawn.) The Christian nationalist appeal is to, what historian Frank L…