Religion Dispatches
…Millionaires and billionaires padded their pockets with money they had no use for while literally millions are on the brink of homelessness or are already homeless. You helped build America’s house on the sand and now that the storm has come it may not stand. One of the first jobs God gave to humans was to care for the earth God created. You have continually drawn the ire of those seeking to live this call by seeking public policy that threatens…
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…re, what, and what now?—demands a serious response, leading to a highly focused narrative account of one’s life. This storytelling is what one critic has termed an advanced literary exercise, a “re-editing” of the self in which one narrative, a life to come, was traced over another, a life already lived. Yes, this is literary drama. Yet what we have in the Spiritual Exercises is a textual practice minus the page: it is the individual life that f…
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…to act in much the same way as those traumatized Japanese, for the White House to signal that we’d better start scrimping and saving a lot more, because Social Security & Medicare are now on the chopping block? When Bush tried using his re-election capital to privatize Social Security we all rallied to beat him down on the basis of calm reality-based reasoning: we pointed out that Social Security has a pre-paid surplus of $2.5 trillion, that if mo…
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…ears later. “The city has blood on its hands. Dr. Tiller wasn’t killed because he was a doctor, but because the city allowed it to get out of hand.” The debate in the years between touched many people in Wichita. Mary Harren, the local representative of Catholics for Choice in Wichita, says that half of her extended family stopped talking to her when she came out as pro-choice. And, though she remains a devout Catholic, she says she hasn’t been to…
Read More…es heads against rocks and keeping young nubile girls for their own sexual use. On the other hand, the wealthy would sell all that they have and give the proceeds to the poor. I have no need for Jeff Sessions or anyone in this administration to interpret scripture to or for me. What I require is that they exercise the responsibilities of their offices with integrity and compassion. I invite the Attorney General and the White House spokesperson to…
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…any case, the rhetoric and reality gaps when it comes to religion and porn use easily confuses the issues and leaves people at odds in knowing what to do. Associate Pastor Cameron Beyenberg works with youth at a Southern California church. In working with young people between the ages of 14 and 18, Beyenberg notes that teens have a lot of questions abut pornography, and they really want to talk about the issues—even if some of the teens are initia…
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…n the history of the church. That has fallen off dramatically, though, because churches decided to be “efficient” warehouses, or they decided they needed to be able to control and censor the creativity. I also see a lot of precedent for the welcoming spirit in the old European abbeys, and we try to model after that at Fremont Abbey. Abbeys were really places for community gathering, feasts, live music, and good stories. We need new abbeys in Ameri…
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…o do anything about it. The agency has several statutes that it could have used to regulate the ritual use of mercury inside homes, most importantly the Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA, which allows the agency to take a wide variety of regulatory actions against substances that pose an unreasonable risk to the environment or public health. To look into the issue, the EPA established a task force that conducted research and interviewed intere…
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…e of guns that non-gun-owners often forget: They’re fun. They’re owned and used largely for sport. And when they’re not being used, guns can be fondled for the pure pleasure of it. The fun aspect, too, is largely seen as a “guy thing,” even when the gun owners are women. Teddy Roosevelt knew all this very well when he led his well-armed Rough Riders up San Juan hill, and when he sent the Great White Fleet—sixteen battleships armed with huge protr…
Read More…oms, with several parents challenging schools who let transgender children use the restroom of their choice, because they don’t want to have to explain to their kids why Brenda is now Johnnie. This upsets the whole applecart about fixed gender identities as well as traditional male and female sexual and culture roles. It’s not hard to understand how the more public emergence of transgender people is upsetting to more traditionally minded people, e…
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