Religion Dispatches
…ace. We’d made plans to meet up in case we got separated and had exchanged phone numbers. In the middle of the tawaf, the call to prayer came. The guards stopped the tawaf. Some people complied and started to form lines. I found a spot between two women, each with their husbands, and sat down on the line. This seemed an ideal spot until a woman in black niqab squeezed in on my left just as we started the prayer. Okay then. Before we had completed…
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…such revision is necessary, for the next General Convention, to be held in Salt Lake City in 2015. To be sure, though actions related to sexuality and gender identity garner far more attention within and outside the Church, a revision to canons on sacramental theology and practice of a Church formed out of the Reformation tradition (a tradition noted for its refusal of the seven sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church on grounds that only baptism…
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…hop, who might consult other prelates or the local Cardinal, or “just ask around,” and then makes the call about an apparition’s authenticity. “Basically,” admitted the diocese’s representative, they usually ignore the whole thing. “Let it be,” he added, with no apparent irony. By comparison, bishops who enthusiastically support Marian apparitions or manifestations these days, like the former Bishop of Civitavecchia near Rome, run into trouble wit…
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…Who would blame her? In the run-up to the Church’s triennial convention in Salt Lake City in June of 2015, the Task Force for Reimagining the Episcopal Church (TREC) has developed a restructuring plan to streamline the Church’s considerable bureaucracy, eliminating most standing committees and commissions, lowering the goal for diocesan assessments to more realistic levels for the support of the national church, and vesting more power in the offic…
Read More…lete Socolovsky from the email chain. When Merritt’s assistant scheduled a phone meeting with Gallagher to discuss the contract in April of this year, Gallagher never informed Socolovsky about it. When Merritt finally reached Gallagher on the phone in April of this year, he says Gallagher was “placing the blame [for the delay] on Jerome” for not reading Merritt’s emails, which “was all very weird and unprofessional, and it made me uncomfortable.”…
Read More…ch of Christian denominations working with us now.” Discussions during the phone bank covered the Golden Rule, whether the Leviticus view of homosexuality as an abomination also extended to eating shrimp, and how civil marriage licenses are distinct from religious weddings. Most of the calls lasted mere seconds, with people not home or not interested. After an hour working the phones, Scott Holley, 33, cheerfully noted that he had become “unfazed…
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…level of devotion frequently compared to religious faith. The cult of the iPhone revolves around the notion that its smooth, technocolor surface signals a web of connections between its owner and a network of users who are global, hip, and savvy. But it is also true that the iPhone works so well because each individual can customize the device. That’s why these faith-based applications have proliferated: The door is wide open to claim that space i…
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…the story, she returns home, opens Google India, and tracks down the phone number for the sweet shop her grandfather mentioned. Within seconds, she has called the store on her smart phone, and Yusuf’s grandson—who answers—has likewise opened Google to research visas for a reunion too long denied. We can understand the implications of this storyline by putting it into conversation with its longer historical context. The logic of the plot—that Googl…
Read More…ing, the status of Obama’s Catholic National Advisory Council is unclear. (Phone calls to Obama headquarters were not returned.) However, the dust-up between the always vociferous Donohue and the Obama campaign was reminiscent of the battles that took place during the 2004 presidential campaign when a group of conservative Catholics and neoconservatives were joined by conservative Christian evangelicals in attacking the Catholic authenticity of th…
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…that Democrats need to get better at telling stories than at crunching the numbers, in this battle of the budget, the numbers actually matter. Hell, it’s a fight about numbers. And balance. And the virtue of justice. What this latest budget battle, and the question of raising the debt ceiling, and the straw polls are revealing, is just how Tertullian a wing of the Republican Party has become. It not only offers absurd arguments with a straight fac…
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