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Catholic Church Ordained Women Before, Can Do it Again

By Phyllis Zagano

…rd. I had foundation funding to send a copy to each diocesan bishop in the United States, and every bishop in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the United Kingdom and South Africa has received the offer of a download. Each member of the Council of Cardinals, its secretary, and Pope Francis has received a copy, along with the original Italian-languages essays. If the hierarchy will consider what history really says, perhaps they will think about whe…

Did the Pope Embrace the Prosperity Gospel?

By Sarah Posner

Late last month, Pope Francis met with charismatic Christian and Pentecostal leaders at the Vatican, including prosperity gospel televangelist Kenneth Copeland, a popular American religious figure whose theology and lifestyle is directly at odds with the Pope’s. The meeting was not the humble Pope’s first encounter with the self-anointed bishops of bling. In February, he recorded a video message for a Copeland conference, in which he called for u…

Are Atheists Taking 1st Amendment Suits Too Far?

By Gordon Haber

While sanctimonious conservatives and godless liberals alike await the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Hobby Lobby case, two more suits with serious church and state implications are quietly making their way through the system. The Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) is a group of “atheists, agnostics and skeptics” with a Scientology-esque fondness for litigation. Recently the FFRF has gone after the so-called “parsonage exemption,” which allow…

Violent, Genocidal Anti-Palestinian Rhetoric Moving to US?

By David Sheen

…se, his funeral last October was the largest in the country’s history, with 800,000 Israelis attending. In the past month, Rabbi Noam Perel, head of Bnei Akiva, the largest Jewish religious youth group in the world, called for the mass-murder of Palestinians and for their foreskins to be scalped and brought back as trophies, alluding to an episode in the Book of Samuel; and a Jerusalem city councillor, in charge of security, encouraged a crowd to…

US Archbishop and Vatican-Appointed “Overseer” Attends Annual Meeting of Women Religious

By Emily Baxter

…of Women Religious (LCWR), the organization representing 80 percent of the United States’ Catholic sisters. This year’s meeting, held in Orlando, Florida, was made up of 825 nuns and only three priests, one of whom was Seattle’s Archbishop J. Peter Sartain—the official charged by the Vatican with overseeing the LCWR following last year’s harsh assessment of American nuns. The Vatican came down hard on American sisters last year, admonishing them…

My God, David Brooks

By John Modern

…t is almost invisible outside the academic world because the text is nearly 800 pages of dense, jargon-filled prose.” Rest assured, we do not need to read Taylor for ourselves because David Brooks can be trusted. His ongoing effort to distill for us the density of jargon is a choice well-honed. The result: a column that we have chosen to read (again, wisely) and, moreover, a readerly choice that becomes a sign to others and ourselves that we are a…

Lifestyles of the Rich and Pious

By Patricia Miller

…nd for the poor.” CNN reports that “10 of the 34 active archbishops in the United States live in buildings worth more than $1 million.” The median home value in the U.S. is $174,200. Not surprisingly, that list includes some of the nation’s most outspoken conservative bishops—and allies of the Republican Party—who seem to take the whole “prince of the church” thing more literally than some of their fellow prelates. Here’s a rundown: • New York Car…

Teaching Love: Soulforce Takes it to the Quad

By Nick Street

On a chilly but brilliantly sunlit Friday morning, about two dozen people have gathered along the sidewalk near the main entrance to Central Baptist College in Conway, Arkansas. The group includes a local lesbian couple who have been together for 35 years, a young African-American trans-man who came out of the closet a week before he graduated from another Southern Baptist college in Missouri, and a 22-year-old aspiring minister from Philadelphia…

Boy Scout “Perversion Files” Raise Questions about Abuse in Mormon Contexts

By Joanna Brooks

…the Church has partnered with the BSA, hosting scout troops in most of its United States congregations. (The New York Times profiled the LDS-BSA relationship—including the experience of gay LDS Boy Scouts impacted by BSA’s LGBT discrimination policies—this week.) Today, a whopping 34% of Boy Scouts troops nationwide are co-sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But sources who have scrutinized the BSA’s so-called “perversi…

Colorado’s Personhood Initiative Fails—For Now

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

Colorado’s fetal personhood ballot initiative petition failed to get enough valid signatures, and so the measure will not appear on the ballot, Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler announced this morning. According to the Denver Post, some of the signatures were deemed invalid, so the petition was found to have only 85,800 valid signatures—305 signatures short of the required 86,105. Jennifer Mason, speaking for Personhood Colorado, said tha…