Religion Dispatches
…Duddy-Burke sees the days ahead as “an opportunity for Catholics to get in contact with the cardinals who are going to be part of the conclave and talk to them about our dreams for the Church and what we need in a new leader.” Joelle Casteix, Western Region Director for SNAP, which advocates on behalf of some 20,000 survivors and allies of those abused by Roman Catholic priests, likewise sees the action of laypeople as critical to any meaningful c…
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…tle sign if they don’t wish to be touched, but one girl who is open to the contact is extended in child’s pose, the front of her body pressed against the floor, arms reaching out. The teacher comes up behind her and gently presses down on her sacrum—a Latin word derived from the Greek hieron osteon or “sacred bone”, from the belief that the soul resides there. I have known the positive jolt of electricity that I have felt in yoga classes when a te…
Read More…idst the accusations from two men that they’ve had “inappropriate physical contact” with state Rep. Nikki Haley, the Palin-endorsed gubernatorial candidate, comes Knotts’ interjection: “We already got one raghead in the White House. We don’t need another in the Governor’s Mansion,” Knotts said during a live internet interview this week on Pub Politics — a laid back program usually conducted over beers in a local Columbia bar. Knotts issued an ap…
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…hours with them on the phone. Then, after Jesus was a no-show, I stayed in contact with them—the ones who would talk to me, anyway—over the following days and months, checking back in to see how or if their thinking had changed. I learned a lot about the seductive power of radical belief, the inscrutable vagaries of biblical interpretation, and how our minds can shape reality to fit a narrative. I also learned that you don’t have to be nuts to bel…
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…g on of hands was going to be prohibited. We and all of the women we could contact would wear pink undies. We did. We had a quiet bond. It was doubly good to have a loud bond as well as a quiet one. The judicatory and the Committee on the Ministry was apoplectic. Most people in the room didn’t really know that women couldn’t do what my friends were doing so they just thought the mixture of genders was sweet. I never heard from the judicatory about…
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…ingly immigrants and people of color. Catholic churches with ties to Latin American progressive traditions, African-American Protestant churches with roots in the Civil Rights movement and white Protestant churches in the social gospel tradition bring a very different standard for what it means to care for the community. While he was working with OUR Wal-Mart in California, Jones met a young Latina woman, a Wal-Mart employee, who was pregnant. The…
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…, thereby becoming the most public of hermits and the most prolific writer American Catholicism has ever produced. But Merton was always unsettled, restless; never, one cannot help feeling, really content. He was toying with the idea of leaving Gethsemani, and possibly leaving the monastic life altogether, not long after having been caught in a love affair with a 25-year-old local nurse, Margie Smith. The character of that young woman is clear fro…
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…aced. but it seems to me something inside Hamas has died because it’s lost contact with many of its principles and substituted unadulterated hatred in its place. Destroying Israel, itself an impossible task, became more important than feeding its people, which is a more realizable goal, or even seeking a viable path to liberation. Like many (maybe all) countries, Israel is accountable for being fast and loose with its principles too. A society fou…
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…connection when we do reach out, and AI fails to provide that soul-to-soul contact. Jewish authorities accept writing as a viable mode of transmission rather than lose knowledge to the inconsistencies of human memory. Yet even while accepting this technological shift, they make sure to place value on the human transmission that’s being at least partially replaced by this change. We can negotiate a non-apocalyptic future of living with AI only by h…
Read More…attraction,” while adhering to a code of morality that forbids all sexual contact outside the bounds of heterosexual marriage. Others claim and openly affirm a gay identity while carefully negotiating a path to maintaining church activity and membership. All of these paths entail profound risks, costs, and consequences. All require a level of conscious deliberation on matters of sexuality and spirituality that heterosexual Mormons take for grante…
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