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Pope Francis Dithering About Women, Skittish About Cops

By Mary E. Hunt

…ost other Christian denominations have done with good results. My own deep reservations about the women’s diaconate come from its very nature as a recipe for a woman’s job in a patriarchal culture. Surely it shores up the current system to have women handling all of the everyday work—visiting the sick, caring for children, helping the abused, teaching religious education, which they do already—so that the men can get on with the preaching, teachin…

God Dissolves into the Occupy Movement

By Nathan Schneider

…dated ourselves to these new circumstances, but not happily and with grave reservations about where this is taking us. And now it seems a mainly youthful Occupy movement is giving voice to all of our previously silent reservations and shouting out a very loud non serviam! It really leaves the establishment with very little to say. What’s their response going to be: domination is good for you?? It was a little more than three decades ago when Marg…

The Pope, The Chef & Krampus: Merry Yikesmas!

By Peter Manseau

…No Reservations such a surprise. Anthony Bourdain, the celebrity chef and bestselling author, as well as the program’s host and guiding intelligence, has put together an hour of television that is at once a masterpiece of the “Culinary Journey Through Our Grand Traditions” genre of holiday specials, and a spoof of the same. The show pulls you along like a fizzy dinner party chased by a drug-addled dream (including a bubbly rendition of a Catalan…

Why We Won’t Let Jonestown (Or 9/11 or Sandy Hook) Die

By Kelsey Osgood

…Fondakowski, “Just put your cap forward and keep moving.” But perhaps the best way to understand this text is to view it as the story of a small group coming to grips with a mass cultural trauma. As a number of notable sociologists put forth in their book Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (University of California Press, 2004), society, to put it simply, can experience trauma like an individual can. As with the individual, there are a few t…

‘Anti-Romeo’ Vigilante Squads Target Men Suspected Of Being Gay; More in the Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…married in first month; Lutheran priests barred from officiating More than 800 same-sex couples were married in March after marriage equality went into effect on the first of the month; 770 had already been in civil partnerships. The Lutheran Evangelical Church has decreed that priests are not permitted to marry same-sex couples and some bishops warned that those who do would face “consequences.” From a March 1 story: In spite of the church rulin…

Snake-Handlers, False Messiahs, and a Few Great Souls: 14 Who Died in 2014

By Daniel Silliman

…medical treatment. He was 42. Coots was pastor of a snake-handling church of 30, in Middlesboro, Ky., and the subject of a reality TV show called Snake Salvation. He was well aware of the risks of handling snakes: Coots’best friend died of snake poison in 1998 and Coots himself had been bitten nine times, one bite permanently disfiguring his right hand. “If I quite taking up serpents,”Coots explained, “I would die and go to hell.”…

More Mixed Signals from Pope Francis; Church of England Wrestles with Rifts; Faith Groups Lobby Pro & Con on Irish Referendum; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…artners in Israel,” notes the Times. “Civil marriage does not exist in the country, where the solemnization of marriage is entirely controlled by the state rabbinate, and homosexual unions are not in themselves recognized.” Vietnam: Couple marries on airplane flight A Vietnamese lesbian couple celebrated a Valentine’s Day wedding on a Vietjet flight from Ho Chi Minh City to Bangkok. Pink News notes, “Same-sex marriage is not legally recognized in…

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Ramadan

By Haroon Moghul

…: Sudden boost in revenue at grocery stores anywhere Muslims live in large numbers. Hint: If you think buying food while you’re hungry can help the economy, grocery shopping in Ramadan could save the Eurozone and prevent a Grexit. Suhouri: Suhur: Meal you eat right before the fast begins. Houri: Shatteringly beautiful, apparently human but not actually human companion provided to you in paradise, assuming you make it there. You don’t like the fact…

Distant Churches and the Isolated Poor: Lessons from Katrina, Ten Years Later

By R. Drew Smith

…ded social resource scarcity for those most in need. What this large-scale flight of social resources left in its wake was not an urban demographic characterized by upward mobility but by severe poverty and social isolation. Between 1970 and 1990, the percentage of persons living in neighborhoods with a poverty rate of 40 percent or higher grew from 7.8 to 15.8 percent for blacks and from 7.0 to 9.5 percent for Hispanics, and by 2010 the proportio…

Thoreau’s Ferocious Critique of Philanthropy Does Not Make Him “Selfish”

By Alda Balthrop-Lewis

…t philanthropic giving is fine—do it if you like it—but it will not enact a just society. Those who read Walden as the mostly falsified account of a hypocrite forget that this hypocrite called us to work for a justice beyond token charity. Schulz offers an oversimplified reading of a complicated life, but worse, she dismisses one of the best resources we have for thinking about a far more important question: what does true philanthropy—love of our…