Religion Dispatches
…express obsolete ideology? Or would blogging help the pope realize that some of his teachings are a wee bit outdated? What next, Pope Benedict on Facebook? If so, you can bet your mortgage that plenty of “good” Catholics will be editing their profiles before they ”friend His Holiness.”…
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…incere belief that coexistence was possible. Peace Now, founded in 1978 to promote a genuine and just peace between Israel and Palestine, was a real, forceful movement in the 1980s, with some political power. No more. In fact, it is today’s protest movement, a mostly centrist movement, which has taught us that Israel has transformed into a more ethnocentric, illiberal, even autocratic, right-wing society. Many are against this, but the mere fact t…
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…f? I think this book can go a long way to inform people about the tensions between democracy and social control in American history. And it can teach people a lot about how evangelical Protestant traditions have changed over time, including the ways they have reshaped strategies to engage the political realm. I’m afraid there are no pleasurable parts of this book. In fact, it’s really grim. People with relatively good intentions did bad things. Bu…
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…rged. The origin of this project, we’re told, was with a 2007 episode of BET’s American Gangster devoted to the infamous career of Jeff Fort. Natalie Moore, a journalist and author of a book about masculinity in hip-hop, watched the show, saw professor and youth activist Lance Williams interviewed in it, and the next day she emailed him, asking for a list of books about contemporary black street gangs in Chicago. “There are none,” he replied. An…
Read More…dinal and Francis ally Sean O’Malley over for the weekend. The Franciscan lives in a “rundown rectory” in Boston’s South End. I bet he would love the hot tub….
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…r what grounds them biologically. Being “created in the image of God” is a better bet. We are all learning together about this, some of us more willing to admit what we do not know than others. But we can certainly agree in the meantime that persons trump genitals, that competence and willingness to serve are far more relevant than gender identity when it comes to Christian life. This means ordination and decision making for women on a par with me…
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…olic terms, are not. Imagine a similar discussion of the masculine body. I bet the mere suggestion of penis enlargements as a moral issue for men would stop more conversations than it would start. Try a simple substitute of ‘masculine’ for ‘feminine’ in this section of the document: Plastic surgery that is not medico-therapeutic can be aggressive toward the masculine identity, showing a refusal of the body in as much as it is a refusal of the ‘sea…
Read More…ce you accept the reality of the situation and calm your emotions, you can better see your way out of it. Take the health care reform debate for example. Those of us who support health care reform need to stop complaining about the rabble rousers at town hall meetings and instead acknowledge that “all events have led up to now.” The question then becomes, what do we do about it? Health care reform advocates believe that logic, reason, and the utte…
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…ilding up while the rest of us struggle to make ends meet—and that they’ve betrayed their loyalty to the group. (“Is Mitt Romney really one us?”, every Obama ad seems to ask.) Many in the Democrats’ activist base are well to the left of Obama and have long been skeptical about, or outright rejected, the big three values of the right (as Haidt so often complains). Even many who hold them as private values are often resistant to making them a basis…
Read More…d is, “Would you go to church every week if you had the opportunity?” I’ll bet his numbers would have been much higher for gays and lesbians who desire to go to church but are unable to find a welcoming pew. All in all, I’m grateful for Barna even wandering into the subject of gay and lesbian religious belief. I think his study is important and can go a long way to dispelling the old “gays vs. God” dichotomy that too often gets played out in the m…
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