Religion Dispatches
…must not let a few bishops at the top hinder the global effort simply because they continue to fight change within the Church. In 2010, the Pope made an important first step in a journey that the leaders in the Church must make towards a compassionate, realistic view of safer sex and condom use. Like any voyage, the first step is the hardest, but those of us in the Church hope and pray that our leaders will have the courage to undertake this pil…
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…ith someone who said that he was a witch. The problem is, when it comes to use of the word “witch,” real witches can be nearly as varied as those of novels, movies, and television. Most vocal in their use of the term are segments of the pagan Wiccan communities. Among contemporary Wiccans there is often (following the logic of identity politics) an effort to reclaim the term “witch” as meaning exclusively those of their nature-revering, goddess-ro…
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…Schedule 1, which classifies them as having “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” In light of such classification, suggesting that psychedelics might have a religious use seems anathema. The past few times I’ve taught the course, however, I’ve noticed that students seem more receptive to the idea. I know that it’s an anecdotal observation, but it tracks with a growing interest in the potential medicinal and spiritual…
Read More…f wedlock, public support of or homosexual lifestyle, public support of or use of abortion, public support of or use of a surrogate mother, public support of or use of in vitro fertilization or artificial insemination, public membership in organizations whose mission and message are incompatible with Catholic doctrine or morals, and/or flagrant deceit or dishonesty.” The new contract is “doubled in size and is strikingly different from previous Ar…
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…] community that could potentially, and in the Branch Davidian case did, cause harm to children instead of saving them from harm.” The use of the term provokes specific reactions, and those reactions often include state violence against the people we claim to want to protect. All of this is important, because when I say the ~Negative48 group, based in Dallas, surrounding Michael Protzman, is a cult, I do so knowing full well the problematic baggag…
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…ave a distant abortion connection. Stem cell lines derived from aborted fetuses were used in testing those vaccines. These realities prompted statements from both the Vatican and U.S. Catholic bishops on how Catholics and others could ethically access vaccines. Their framing of this issue could have a far-reaching impact on religious thinking about how caring for individuals facing health challenges and promoting the “common good” may take priorit…
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…d how churches are growing digitally in general. And it’s interesting, because churches have traditionally been slow on the uptake with social media and getting digital. Of course, outreach and evangelism is part of the church’s DNA, and that’s fine. And so you start to use social media for that, you’ve got live broadcasts on Facebook, and it gets started kind of slowly at first. But then, what we found that really scared me is that a lot of small…
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…a bit and think about language, since we are at least talking about how we use, or should use, words. Fully to appreciate what I am saying, know that here in Riverside County, California, I am writing close in time and space to the shootings in San Bernardino. I have been driven to distraction and anger by the way the word “terrorism” is kicked about. For example: mass shootings by a white Christian, “crazy, unexplainable,” but, mass shootings by…
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…on you? Sometimes that’s more difficult to see in a Christian context because of the way that Christians think about God as Creator. There is this reaction to animism, to thinking of the world itself being God. Everyone wants to draw a distinction because God created the world, God is not the world. They start to worry that people might start to have a misunderstanding of God if they think too highly of God’s creation. Those are lines that are dr…
Read More…nd Institutionalized Persons Act, arguing that it “protects religious land uses from discrimination.” Thus because of Republican legislation, conservative opponents of the Park 51 project have had to fight not on legal grounds, but on the far weaker notion that the community center’s organizers should build elsewhere out of respect for the Ground Zero site. That, it should be said, is hardly a compelling argument.** Or as Melissa Rogers puts it on…
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