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Too Late for Apologies: Three Steps the U.S. Bishops Should Take to Prevent Another Sexual Abuse Scandal

By Grant Gallicho

…tican as canon law for U.S. dioceses). The Charter called for dioceses to cooperate with civil authorities and comply with reporting laws, to permanently remove abuser-priests from ministry, and to establish majority-lay review boards to look at allegations against clergy and advise bishops whether to suspend the accused. The bishops also required priests, deacons, diocesan employees, volunteers, and children in education programs to undergo “safe…

How Evangelicals Pick Presidents

By Sarah Posner

…y still are) bitter that leaders didn’t get behind their guy until it was too late. “Who is James Dobson going to endorse?” was the never-ending query around the proverbial pundit water cooler. He endorsed Huckabee—finally, at the eleventh hour, when it was far too late. Huckabee wrote of his own resentment about the leadership’s refusal to get behind him in his 2008 book, Do the Right Thing, while praising “prophetic voices who broke with the old…

Presbyterians, Change Hearts & Minds, Begin Ordaining Gays

By MaryAnn McKibben Dana

…r the change. This victory finally removed exclusionary language from the Book of Order, which required “fidelity within the covenant of marriage between a man and a woman, or chastity in singleness.” The old language also required prospective ministers and officers to repent of “any self-acknowledged practice which the confessions call sin”—a list that includes transgressions as varied as usury, “undue delay of marriage,” and “immoderate use of m…

RI Civil Unions Religious Exemption Sets Dangerous Precedent

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…at says no religious organization—including some hospitals, cemeteries, schools and community centers—or its employees may be required to treat as valid any civil union, providing a religious exemption “of unparalleled and alarming scope,” Chafee said in a statement. Most “religious liberty” exemptions for religious organizations guarantee the rights they already have, like refusing to perform a ceremony for a couple or allow them to use church pr…

Jews and Baseball: A Reflection on a Longtime Love Affair

By Rebecca T. Alpert

Walking down the street in my neighborhood a few years ago I was warmly greeted by the president of my synagogue, who cheerily introduced me to her new male companion. “You’ll like Rebecca,” she said. “She’s the one who gives those baseball sermons on Yom Kippur I was telling you about.” The man smiled knowingly. I smiled as best I could, trying to suppress my desire to say what was on my mind, which was something like, “Goddamit, I gave a sermon…

Week in Religion: Satan Sandwich, Captain Israel v. Foreskin Man, Christian Missile Launchers

By Michael J. Altman

…ch run by monks in North Dakota has run short of work hands. In the comic book superhero circumcision battle of the century, Captain Israel takes on Foreskin Man. Looking for some clerical training? A couple of reitirees in Oklahoma run an online Bible college, the Apostolic Faith Online Bible Institute. A study finds that more education does not drive you away from religion, but instead liberalizes your religious beliefs. Israel’s basketball leag…

Perry’s Galileo Moment

By Sarah Posner

…herkat of Southern Illinois University shows that sectarian Christians do poorly on basic scientific literacy questions, and therefore have difficulty engaging in scientific discussions involved in public policy debates on issues like climate change. “Sectarian Christians” is the term Sherkat uses for what most reporters and pundits call evangelicals, but by which Sherkat means denominational and non-denominational Christians who believe the bible…

Catholics Fire Back at Bishops’ Anti-Gay Campaign

By Peter Montgomery

…os, a priest and sociology professor at Georgetown University, a Jesuit school, said this week’s announcements should be considered in the context of the new liturgy that Catholic churches will adopt next month, which he said reflects a more hierarchical and patriarchal, and less democratic, mindset. He said a century of Catholic social justice doctrine was grounded in the lived experience of injustice that people were experiencing, for example, a…

If the Girl Scouts Investigated the Bishops…

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…strongly disagree with: It may interest you to know that Cordileone was also one of the major driving forces behind Prop. 8 in California, which outlawed same-sex marriage.) Also on the committee is Most Rev. George Rassas. In 2008, Cardinal Francis George, Archbishop of Chicago, said in a deposition that Rassas had “withheld information about abuse allegations.” These are two of the people who will be seeing whether Girl Scouts USA meets the appr…

Sex, Violence, Art, and Religion

By Kent L. Brintnall

…remains valuable to thinking about gender and sexuality—and religion. The book was largely inspired by—and shaped around—my idiosyncratic obsessions and my intuition that there was some relationship between them and that they all spoke to each other, to dominant cultural fantasies about masculinity, and to Christianity. I had this sense that there was something to be gained by paying close attention to representations of the male-body-in-pain—acro…