Religion Dispatches
…Catholics will not re-define their relationship to Roman authority in the relatively near future. So, if Euro-America is a lost Vatican cause, then where is the Church growing? Where is its future? The answer seems relatively clear. The Church is growing in South America, in sub-Saharan Africa, and is even making significant inroads in the Far East. And what these emerging Catholic populations want is a culturally conservative theology (recall the…
Read More…idential hopefuls have kissed the rings of the nation’s most high-profile televangelists, groveling for votes from their television studios to their megachurches, the fruits of their insidious demands for their congregants’ money with a promise that God will make them rich in return. Trump, like the televangelists, is a publicity hog with an empathy problem: I’m rich, and you could be too if you weren’t such a loser (or, in the case of the televan…
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…to same-sex couples if marriage equality violates the clerk’s “sincerely held religious belief.” Senate Bill 522 passed the Senate Tuesday on a primarily partisan vote, and now heads to the Republican-controlled House. If the tactic sounds familiar, it should. The “religious recusal” of a state employee was made infamous in 2015 by Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, and was a central feature of the 2016 Mississippi “religious freedom” bill that’s been put…
Read More…rgest television network, owned by a conservative evangelical bishop, has helped elect 24 current congressmen in Brasilia. And at local levels, powerful Pentecostal and Baptist churches are gaining influence in city and state governments across the country, posing a challenge to secular moderates but also to other members of the clergy in what’s traditionally been considered the world’s largest Catholic nation. Sarah DiLorenzo examines recent cult…
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…a part of religion by another. To approach issues in terms of politicized religion tells us only that the investigator understands religion, politics, and their demarcation differently from the people or groups being studied—to focus on “politicized religion,” therefore, is to miss the point. What we need to attend to is how these two domains—the religious and the political—are delineated in a culture or society. How are these distinctions reinfor…
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…hat the early fetus has the moral status of a person. Fierce denunciation fell upon the head of Ms. Pelosi, not from the societies of Catholic theologians who know better, but from bishops and cardinals. Bishops are many things. They are pastors and administrators and fund raisers. They are businessmen who handle extensive tax-exempt property holdings. They are very active lobbyists. They are not professional theologians though they often play one…
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…e for Democrats to give space to Georgia Senator and Baptist preacher Raphael Warnock to deliver what essentially amounted to a sermon at the DNC. After all, Black Christians remain the backbone of the Democratic coalition. But just as the DNC would have come off as more inclusive by featuring Palestinian American and transgender speakers (most LGBTQ+ Americans are, incidentally, nonreligious), secular Americans could have been included too. Repre…
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…aren’t so much sober accusations of individuals’ crimes than an insiders’ code for ‘elite liberals.’ The Satanic abuse panic of the 1980s and 90s led to the persecution and false convictions of many innocent people and caused traumatic rifts in communities. The panic involved gothic stories of bloody ceremonies conducted by community-members in black robes, including graphic claims of child and adult sexual abuse and rumors of specific “cult” loc…
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…e, still, today). I was Catholic under protest. Educating myself about my religion helped—I read books about Catholicism, a little theology, encyclicals, a few biographies of saints and Church doctors. I developed a bizarre fascination with the Canon Code. But mostly, writing helped me stick with being Catholic. Reading poetry by Catholics and Catholic poetry—the poems of Daniel Berrigan were both—helped the most. That Berrigan was a poet, that he…
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…and delusion, it is usually being refashioned into a banal, therapeutic, self-help technique that can actually reinforce those roots.” Thanissaro Bhikkhu, an American Buddhist monk who deploys encyclopedic knowledge of the sutras in his cultural commentary, has pointed out crucial differences between traditional and modern (Western) mindfulness. “The Buddha himself defined sati as the ability to remember,” he writes, whereas contemporary teaching…
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