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Pope Francis Loves Nuns, But Can the Divide Between Sisters and Vatican Be Healed?

By Megan Sweas

…he direction of Pope Francis. This year’s “Nuns on the Bus” tour starts in St. Louis this week and ends in Washington, D.C., in time for the start of the papal visit on September 23. Its theme, “bridge the divide,” refers to the political divide in our country, but the trip also speaks to the need for healing between sisters and church leadership. “Obviously, Pope Francis’ message is exactly what we’ve been doing for 43 years,” Campbell told Relig…

Bangladesh’s Atheist Blogger Still Wants to Talk

By Austin Dacey

…rocities committed during the 1971 war for independence of what was then East Pakistan, many of whom went on to become leaders in religious parties such as Jamaat, bent on sabotaging the country’s strides towards secular democracy. In February 2013, after the long-sought International Crimes Tribunal convicted Abdul Quader Mollah and others of war crimes, mass protests denounced the sentences as overly lenient and demanded death sentences and the…

On NSA Spying, What’s With the Silence of the Lambs?

By Peter Laarman

…properly turned down, the faint sound of heels clicking. Given gruesome past instances of prying, spying, and coercion of the conscience by state actors over centuries, one might imagine that American religious leadership would be up in arms at this moment. Our bloody history makes clear that all religion that is not state-dominated has a dog in this fight. But all we’re hearing from the religious sector so far has been a whimper, not a roar. It…

How Herbalife’s Gospel of Health and Wealth Fuels a Billion-Dollar Deception

By Michael Schulson

…d complicated affair. Herbalife’s travails started in 2012, when the activist investor Bill Ackman took on a one billion dollar short on Herbalife, betting that their stock would tank. Then he set about trying to destroy the company. Ackman made an Herbalife takedown website, supported anti-Herbalife groups, and managed to get the FTC to open an investigation into Herbalife’s sales model in 2014. It may have been all for naught. The conflict surfa…

Days of Reckoning for the Philadelphia Archdiocese

By Anthea Butler

…ers to remain in its ranks. The local Catholic dioceses of Kansas City and St. Louis have upped the ante by going after the organization that exists to help the abused, SNAP, subpoenaing its records of over 100,000 people who have been interviewed about sexual abuse over the years. Juxtaposing the past Holy Week against the lurid details of the abuse has been agonizing. When priests pass boys around for sex at church summer camp, there is no doub…

Possibility that Bachmann Believes in Wifely Submission Irrelevant?

By Julie Ingersoll

…h was founded to counter mutual submission theology. Others, like the Reconstructionists, as I noted in the earlier post, “have suggested that, given the biblical order for families, women probably shouldn’t be voting.” Were Senator Danforth to talk with the folks over at No Longer Quivering who work to help women leave the Quiverfull Movement, he would find that in this community submission means absolute submission to your husband and a life of…

All Candy, No Jesus: Halloween in America

By Mary Valle

…have knives—safety hazard. So I had a wooden athame that I bought from the St. Louis Hari-Krishna temple that I used instead. My roommates found no end of amusement in this; they kept stealing it to use as a letter opener. (They also didn’t seem to realize that the athame was a tool, not a god.) I don’t hold that against them, though; they were jackasses, but I knew that when I moved in with them. He continued: I had a boss once who, although he w…

Bishops Elect Moderate to Lead Pro-Life Committee

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…. Cardinal O’Malley particularly raised the hackles of Archbishop Burke of St. Louis, who reportedly intimated that O’Malley was under the influence of Satan. In response, Cardinal O’Malley called for civility. In a lengthy blog post about the funeral, O’Malley warns against being nasty in the name of a cause one believes in: At times, even in the Church, zeal can lead people to issue harsh judgments and impute the worst motives to one another. Th…

For Saturn’s Sake, Remember the Dead

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…We’ve probably all heard that this festival was the real precursor to Christian Christmas, with its funny inversion of social roles, the masters serving meals to slaves, the eating, the drinking, the gift-giving, the general merriment. Saturday is still Saturn’s day in English, and we all know that his day (or rather, his night) is set aside especially for the parties. But all this playful artifice had a very serious underside, a brooding quality…

Papal Profanity: The Vatican’s Pagan Museum

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…tertain, or to piss people off? I definitely wrote to educate, myself first and foremost. I aspired to entertain, which is an odd thing to say about academic writing in the main. I definitely did not write to piss anybody off. I’m pissed off enough myself about the state of our nation, of many religious communities, not to mention the quality of our political discourse and cultural debate, so there’s no need for me to contribute to that state, m…