Religion Dispatches
…holic Church, I’ve been having some interesting conversations by email and phone with Catholics and non-Catholics alike. Some people have emailed me to say “right on.” Others, like some of my relatives, are just hurt, scared, and wondering if they can trust anything about their local priest, diocese, or bishop. I’ve received invitations to come and join the Episcopal Church (are you listening, Father Balmer?) but I am not quite “there” yet. Yet th…
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…night dancing with, someone who I had spoken to just a week before on the phone, her laughter weakened but still familiar. When I thought about her ashes being scattered around Boston I felt a momentary panic. Where could I ever go to find her again? Last week, just in time for the Feast of All Soul’s Day, celebrated each year on November 2, the Catholic Church’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith released a new Instruction regarding the…
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…illing to talk about science as a human endeavor. I spoke to Montgomery by phone to find out more about these surprising aspects of his story. ______________ BWL: You write in your introduction that you started out to write a more traditional debunking of creationism’s flood geology, from your perspective as a geologist. And you ended up with something different. What happened? DM: I learned a lot writing this book. And I like it much better than…
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…upport for Proposition 8 and commit four hours each week to the ground and phone campaign. A primary source of Mormon messaging during the Proposition 8 campaign was the anonymously-authored “Six Consequences if Prop 8 Fails” document, which went viral across Mormon social networks after its introduction by email in mid-August and was utilized as a training document and handout in the Mormon-coordinated ground campaign. The document alleged that t…
Read More…ould soon be at war. Traffic stopped, there were no planes in the sky, the phone didn’t ring. I supported the war to come, with only the reservation of who held the keys of command. Still, the enemies of the good must be punished, must be denied the safety of even a parched rocky hillside in a poor land. In 2002 and 2003, the grim infection of another war became more and more certain. I did not support this war. It was wrong, and I said so from my…
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…ntroversial. I don’t like being controversial. I get abused a lot in mail, phone calls and that sort of thing. I don’t enjoy that. But, if you are controversial in the public arena, the people who have given up on Christianity say, “My God, there must be something more to this story than I realized.” So, being controversial is my doorway to the generation of my own children. “The primary issue in the Christian church today is to get away from orig…
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…ical strategies failed dismally, he broke up with his second wife over the phone (just as he’d done with his first) as she lay immobilized in a hospital bed. Blumenthal devotes a good bit of his article on Newt’s conversion to an interview with Deal Hudson, a key Catholic advisor to Team Bush. “From a Catholic point of view,” Hudson told Blumenthal. “Newt’s sins no longer exist–they’ve been absolved. He’s made a fresh start in life. So Newt will c…
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…0 volunteers who walked precincts in a driving rain, and made thousands of phone calls throughout the weekend to every targeted voter in the district,” McClintock remarked. “I can confidently say that those 2,000 votes were Generation Joshua votes.” Such praise is heady stuff for teenagers who want to feel they can make a difference in their world, who yearn for a sense of efficacy and belonging. More specifically, it assures them that the world o…
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…he performed at Wild Goose in July . He spoke with Jesse James DeConto by phone in June. What did your upbringing impress on you as most important for your Christian identity? I don’t know that I really was having those sorts of conversations. As an Episcopalian I was participating in the liturgy. I was living into the liturgical calendar. I was in Sunday School, with certain stories about Jesus and about Scripture. The discussions about what i…
Read More…t of Martin Luther King’s assassination fielded celebratory calls as a telephone operator in Memphis, Tennessee, telephoned us to awake my four-year-old twins from their sleep. Through her sniffles and giggles, this loving grandmother and now proud American citizen, kept repeating, “you tell those babies Obama did it! Obama did it! Wake them up and let them know that “O’RockoBama” [my son’s pronunciation] really did win tonight!” And I also receiv…
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