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Crowdsourced Catholicism: New iPhone App Lets Users Forgive Sins

By Vincent Gonzalez

…r hoary ear for $6.84. Penance’s religiosity is well incapsulated in its splash screen. We find a paraphrase a letter of Saint Ignatius, reworked for a quite different model of religious social networking. The original had read, “To all them that repent, the Lord grants forgiveness, if they turn in penitence to the unity of God, and to communion with the bishop.” Penance’s splash screen, on the other hand, is agnostic even concerning its own effic…

The Problem with Christian Gentlemen: A Short Goodbye to Ted Cruz, the “Mr. Pecksniff” of Presidential Politics

By Peter Laarman

…d self-congratulation. Dickens makes the most of Pecksniff by giving him a number of interior monologues, as here when Pecksniff is rationalizing his decision to pimp out his younger daughter at a rather cheap dowry price to a rich but grotesquely uncouth suitor: All his life long he had been walking up and down the narrow ways and by-places, with a hook in one hand and a crook in the other, scraping all sorts of valuable odds and ends into his po…

Want a Slurpee with Your Birth Control?

By Patricia Miller

…ce?” It’s one of the bishops’ favorite arguments: that birth control is so cheap and so widely available that it isn’t even a question of whether the religious freedom of objecting organizations should be burdened by having to pay for it. The bishops have been claiming since 2012 that birth control is “ubiquitous and inexpensive” and anyone who wants it can get it without insurance coverage for $10 at Target. And as usual, bishops’ allies on the r…

Can a Greek Monastery Be Ground Zero of Global Financial Meltdown?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…they call us a corporation,” he observes. “But I ask you… what company has lasted for 1,000 years?” It is an interesting rhetorical ploy, but it is a question with an obvious answer. The Roman Empire. The Catholic Church. The Byzantine Empire. The Orthodox Church. All corporations. All lasting more than a millennium. In more ways than have been understood to date, Greece has become Ground Zero of the global meltdown, the epicenter of a shockwave…

Dispatches from the Borderlands: “They Came at Night, Trying to Kill Us!”

By Manuel A. Vásquez

…ion, and economic turmoil in their home countries. They have come in large numbers, many of them undocumented, settling among poor South Africans who often resent their presence. While the situation confronting immigrants and poor natives in the United States is not as dire, there are clear signs of simmering tensions around the issue of undocumented immigration, particularly in poor rural communities and around towns that witnessed factory shutdo…

Dispatches from the Borderlands: The Immigration Impasse

By Manuel A. Vásquez

…ny cases, the decision to migrate was not only heart-wrenching, but one of last resort; the only way in which the immigrants’ families could survive. They may also learn about the often devastating effects of immigration on families and communities in sending countries. This is a far cry from the vision of the immigrant as an unscrupulous freeloader. In multicultural/multiethnic congregation, immigrants, for their part, can learn about US civic cu…

The Bible is a Good Book, But God Didn’t Write It

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…ictim he could denigrate. He united all the Germans against the Jews. It’s cheap politics, but we still have people who know how to do that. It doesn’t lead to anything but destruction. How can reeducating ourselves about the Bible—and educating the non-religious about the Bible—help us regain the center? One of my hopes for this book is that it will provide a textbook to talk about the Bible in a new way. A local pastor doesn’t have to actually s…

When Being “Christian” Means Supporting Trump: An Argument For Hiding Your Faith

By Jonathan Malesic

…ued that American Christians were selling out their religious identity for cheap political gain, and that they could help ensure their religious integrity if they took that identity off the market altogether by concealing it in public life. This approach would take seriously Jesus’ advice to pray in secret and to give alms without letting “your left hand know what your right hand is doing” (Matthew 6:3-6). It also would follow an undercurrent in C…

Fear of a Catholic Ghetto

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…ented from holding public office. In the mid-nineteenth century, while the number of Catholic hospitals was growing, the Know Nothing party organized around shared fears that Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Germany were overwhelming the country and acting against white Protestant interests. So the fear of a Catholic ghetto must be understood in light of a real history of Catholics being marginalized during the very time that their health car…

Must We Burn Something to Get Attention?: 50 Years After the Catonsville Nine

By Jason C. Bivins

…illiantly today: in protests, online, in their communities, even in their classrooms. The strategies are many, but the goals can only be achieved if attention increases. If movements form, rather than occasional actions. Renewed reflection on Catonsville helps us not in the sense that it must be emulated, necessarily, but because it underscores how urgently religious Americans need to challenge the public power of America’s corporate Christianity….