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Pop-Culture Angels Are More Than Just Embarrassing Kitsch

By Ed Simon

…y from Victorian sentimentalism. Such angels are on sale at reduced price; cheap wares for cheap faith. It would be an error, however, to fully dismiss pop culture angels. Despite the fact that representations of angels in film and television, comics and music, paperback novels and posters, are filtered through market concerns, such pop culture can still speak to human meaning—and because of that they merit our attention. Besides, the bulk of art…

His Holiness, Inc.: The Dalai Lama as a Spiritual Mega-Brand

By Elizabeth Drescher

…sence, reinforce such commercial constructions or invite their dismantling? “Universities must teach compassion,” His Holiness told the crowd perhaps primed for enlightenment on Monday. After a day of celebrity excitement on the Santa Clara University campus and across the Silicon Valley, it seems that there’s still some homework to do. * Full disclosure: I teach at Santa Clara University and the Markkula Center has funded my own research on two o…

Colonialism and the Crisis Inside the Crisis of Catholic Sexual Abuse

By Kathleen Holscher

…he continued supervision of the congregation. Archbishop Robert Sanchez of Santa Fe agreed, and granted Graff “limited faculties” to carry out work with the homeless and with AIDS patients in Albuquerque. Edward Graff’s journey to Jemez Springs and then on to Albuquerque is typical of the movements of Catholic pedophile priests in New Mexico. From the mid-1960s it was policy within the Archdiocese of Santa Fe to permit clergy under the Paracletes’…

The Sacred and the Dead: How an Iranian-Jewish Angeleno Discovered Her Tribe

By Saba Soomekh

…and uncles to each other’s children. (And yes: we all went together to the Santa Clara shows—the Dead’s last in California a week before their last concerts ever in Chicago over the July 4 weekend.) The author (in front, left, wearing the hat) and some of her Deadhead friends from high school days at the Dead’s show in Santa Clara, Calif., last weekend. Photo courtesy of the author. When it was time for me to choose a college, it wasn’t a difficul…

Will Infamous ‘Candy Cane Memo’ Resurrect Flailing ‘War on Christmas’?

By Joseph Laycock

…I say unilaterally because Elkhorn’s district guidelines specifically list Santa as secular symbol, while the memo places Santa on the “unacceptable” list.) Cases often get silly when courts are asked to rule whether a specific symbol denotes a state endorsement of religion. As law professor Jay Wexler wrote, “The endorsement test makes judges render decisions that are more like interior decorating than constitutional law.” In this case, the attem…

Communion or Disunion?

By Mary E. Hunt

…e with her wrote that after being passed over by the priest for Communion, Barbara actually received a host from a layperson who was acting as a Eucharistic Minister at the mass. Lay ministers distribute Communion at many if not most Catholic churches at this time of increasingly fewer priests. It was the unordained person, not the priest, who did the right thing. This act, based on pastoral common sense, is Catholic clerics’ worst nightmare, what…

Catholic Cohabitators, Fornicators, and Masturbators, Please Step Up

By Sara Ritchey

…about her intimate life? Because she told him so. What’s remarkable about Barbara Johnson’s experience is not that she was denied a sacrament because of her romantic inclinations, but that she made an effort to make those inclinations—clearly regarded as immoral by the Church—known to the clergyman officiating that day. She took a risk by being honest. The denial of the sacrament takes place every day, in churches all across the globe at the disc…

How Much Did Jesus Care About Sex?

By Peter Laarman

…cost of true discipleship. The price it was called upon to pay was all too cheap…We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale; we baptized, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation unasked and without condition…Was there ever a more terrible and disastrous instance of Christianizing the world than this? It’s regrettable, I think, that “cheap grace” has turned into a kind of meme that Rod Dreher can toss into his debate with Andrew Sullivan without…

Beyond Alarmism and Denial in the Dominionism Debate

By Anthea Butler

…church, they’re marinating, so to speak, in the the various teachings of a number of people. I’ve covered many an event where I’ve been waiting in line to get in, and the inevitable conversation with the people around you goes something like this: they ask first where you go to church, and second which teachers you admire, and then you get into a long conversation about the relative virtues of all of them. A really good example of how all these te…

Episcopal Church Assault Data Reveals the Dark Side of Inclusive Christianity

By Charlotte Dalwood

…a random sample size and therefore isn’t statistically representative. The number of individuals reporting victimization in Episcopal spaces is alarming nonetheless. However, I would argue the data is more likely to under- than to overestimate the scope of the abuse that occurs. To see why, the survey results must be interpreted in light of the Episcopal Church’s larger culture of inaction around sexual violence. See no evil, hear no evil… LGBTQ+…