Religion Dispatches
…philosophical debate my husband Jeff and I are having, which is always a good thing.) Jeff and I were kayaking over the weekend on the Conewago Creek near our home. As I was gliding by a patch of marsh grass, I heard the steady gallumphing of a bull frog. Even though I was quite a distance away, I could make out the big boy in the reeds and coasted towards him to see how close I could get before he hopped into the water. But even as I came closer…
Read More
…n February? Ah, not so. As Nick Baumann reports for Mother Jones: The backdoor reintroduction of the statutory rape change relies on the use of a committee report, a document that congressional committees produce outlining what they intend a piece of legislation to do. If there’s ever a court fight about the interpretation of a law—and when it comes to a subject as contentious as abortion rights, there almost always is—judges will look to the comm…
Read More
…s. Blog a bit, tweet a bit, share your favorite liturgical recipes on Facebook if you like, the Holy Father seemed to be saying to the Catholic faithful, but once in a while, for the love of God, zip it. All in all, not a bad idea, but I suspect the silence His Holiness had in mind had nothing to do with the kind of creepy, panoptical Facebook surveillance that led the Rev. Gary LaMoine of Assumption Church in Barnesville, Minnesota to prevent 17-…
Read More…ed the section on conscience, in which Francis said the Church must ‘make room for the consciences of the faithful’ and that individual believers ‘have been called to form consciences, not to replace them.’” “The pope has made clear that the role and formation of consciences, and not replacing them, is in fact for all Catholics, not just for people who are in situations of being divorced and remarried,” Cupich said. But DeBernardo had a different…
Read More
For a while, their message was everywhere. They paid for billboards, took out full-page ads in newspapers, distributed thousands of tracts. They drove across the county in RVs emblazoned with verses from the books of Revelation and Daniel. They marched around Manhattan holding signs. They broadcasted day and night on their network of radio stations. They warned the world. That warning turned out to be a false alarm. No giant earthquake rippled ac…
Read More
…be held in St. Lucia. In addition to Rebekah Ali-Gouveia, WCF’s regional coordinator, the conference is being organized by Sarah Flood-Beaubrun, a member of the St. Lucian Parliament and founder of the Caribbean Centre for Family and Human Rights (CARIFAM), a group that says it works to “promote fundamental human rights” but criticizes “legislation promoting a permissive and indulgent value system that is destroying our societies.” Other speakers…
Read More…utive whose website was recently described by a former employee as “a cesspool of the alt-right…a movement shot through with racism and anti-Semitism.” And now there’s the case of Joseph Schmitz, one of Trump’s top national security advisors. On Thursday, McClatchyDC reported that Daniel Meyer, an intelligence official, has filed a formal complaint alleging that Schmitz made anti-Semitic remarks and targeted Jewish employees during his tenure as t…
Read More…lection night event for tea partiers in Washington. He told them to get a good night’s sleep, eat a good breakfast, and then, Wednesday afternoon, get on with the work of taking over the Republican party. Long critical of “country club Republicanism,” Viguerie said in a press release: “The next stage of the Tea Party movement — Tea Party 2.0 — means taking over the GOP at every level from precinct captain to state chairman, and nominating one of o…
Read More…But a reporter for the Boston Globe was able to confirm that the meeting took place. A letter about Referendum 74 has been read in some Washington stakes—but not all, so we’re not sure if it came from Salt Lake City or not—and the letter encouraged members to vote for the initiative but instructed them not to use ward contact lists for campaigning or to say they were campaigning or voting on behalf of the LDS Church. The letter even specified tha…
Read More…u a twelve pack of caffeine-free Diet Coke and a dozen pink-frosted sugar cookies that there is no anti-Mormon phonebanking script in use by Catholics for Obama. Anywhere. Is anti-Mormonism real? Yes. But even if one poorly-trained rogue phonebanker veered off script into an anti-Mormon ad lib, it does not make for a concerted anti-Mormon effort. (Leave that to orthographically challenged “Heaven is Easy” ministry in Florida.) May cool heads prev…
Read More