Religion Dispatches
…y. Anyway, this Bloomberg piece on power players eschewing the use of cell phones strikes me as of a piece with my executive’s perspective. Technology is for the people who work for you. The article literally discusses someone getting Third-World peasants to loan her a cell in a pinch. You don’t get much more entitled than that. Still, there is something to be said for the virtues of unhooking from technology. I sometimes wonder if the convenience…
Read More…ered little support. Now a seminarian seeking ordination as a Reformed Christian minister, this was the first time I had returned in more than 30 years. Speaking only in Spanish, the pope’s homily touched upon the damage native people suffered through the system of missions that Junipero Serra help found. “The Church, the holy People of God, treads the dust-laden paths of history, so often traversed by conflict, injustice and violence, in order to…
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…rences to gay marriage? Of course not, because that institution did not exist when this stuff was written. Yes, King David loved Jonathan “as his own soul,” but we don’t find their wedding in scripture. Instead, we get from scripture only David’s Amoris Laetitia—his joy of love. In the second chapter, Pope Francis notes that families have changed. Spouses now share more responsibilities. He hits on his oft-repeated belief that in a marriage person…
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…can tradition of religious groups acting as a counterbalance to the weight of consumerist culture. For those with less faith in the commercial model, the situation might seem a little grim. Siddhartha Gautama set out to eliminate desire. But perhaps desire’s greatest structural incarnation—the marketplace—will eliminate him. Thanks to Leah Schulson and Ethan McCurdy for contributing reporting from New York. Also on RD: Religious, Spiritual, and “N…
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…second subpoena from the other side of the state, from the Archdiocese of St. Louis, facing its own charges concerning the alleged abuse of a 19-year-old woman. SNAP has fought the requests, citing Missouri laws protecting the privacy of rape survivors, and describing the records-request as a coordinated Church effort to bully sex abuse victims into silence and harass a longtime opponent into bankruptcy. While the United States Conference of Cath…
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…ive dialogues among them, rather than battle rhetoric, is the way to go. Most striking to me is how much the movie tells us about the failure of American science education. Expelled can be seen, in some senses, as a product of that failure; a failure to teach science as a process that has much power but also significant limitations. If the ‘creation/intelligent design/evolution controversy’ is a window into the American soul, then that window look…
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…ck (Numbers 20:11); who surprises us all the time by blessing us in the least likely circumstances. Mr. President: You need to understand this. You need to work with this, but very, very carefully. Because, like it or not, the endgame in this election is going to be about which candidate does religion better, I fervently wish that Mr. Obama would say a bit more about the problem of cheap grace. Reminding us that people who work very hard for very…
Read More…ganizations like AIPAC and the ADL to distance themselves from ECI. This last step should have been taken long ago. ECI, as critics point out, is no more a friend of Israel than it is a foe of Occupy Wall Street. Rather, it uses Israel (and now Occupy) as a pawn to score electoral points for Republicans. The whole organization is a ruse. It’s the Swift-Boat Veterans of American Jewry. (Oh, and incidentally: Eliot Spitzer?! Surely he was included…
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…ly one-quarter of Catholics attend mass every week (CARA has some of the best, most rigorous tracking of mass attendance; other surveys find higher percentages using more generous methodologies.) The number of priests and nuns has declined precipitously; from 58,000 to 38,000 for priests and from 125,000 to 50,000 for nuns. Despite a significantly larger population, there are 1,300 fewer parishes, with an average of just one priest per parish; som…
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…ve been rushing to criminalize most, if not all, access to abortion. At least 14 states have banned (or are in the process of banning) mifepristone, the abortion pill, and to prevent women from receiving it through the mail from blue states or internationally. (Many of these same states are seeking to prevent their residents from traveling to blue states to receive abortions or prescriptions.) One group that will likely be targeted, Aid Access, is…
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