Religion Dispatches
…Kevin Kolb, but a concussion suffered by Kolb during week one opened the door for Vick’s triumphant return. After two praiseworthy outings, Eagles head coach Andy Reid conceded to the inevitable and designated Vick the team’s official starting quarterback in Kolb’s stead. And despite being sidelined for a month with a rib injury sustained in the team’s first meeting with the Redskins, Vick, with bold runs and aggressive throws characteristic of h…
Read MoreI don’t want to get too swept up in general election poll-mania, but I would just point out a few problems in the new Gallup poll out today on religiosity and voter preferences in the general election. The poll finds that Mitt Romney is performing better among the “very religious,” by a 54-37% margin, while President Obama has a significant edge among the “moderately religious” and “non-religious,” by a 54-40% and 61-30% margin, respectively. The…
Read More…a half century of development on human anthropology is simply a trial balloon. The real thing is allegedly forthcoming from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a weightier venue that will try one more time to present a bulwark against evolving understandings of gender, sex, and how good people live their lives. University of Chicago legal scholar Mary Anne Case lays out the contours of the Vatican’s long and increasingly damaging camp…
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…k what went wrong, what goes wrong, when in a United States where so many good things are happening on the interfaith, racial, ethnic, and gender fronts, this underground of “antis” so frequently emerges. I’ve had numerous Latter-Day-Saint Ph.D. students, know some leaders, have spoken at some of their scholarly gatherings, have learned and taught much about their history, and can’t find anyone who can find something that would rule out a Mormon f…
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…lth care legislation was completely off base, and probably disingenuous. Choosing Life The same charge was levied against Sr. Margaret McBride of St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix when, as a member of the hospital’s ethics committee, she gave her consent to a theraputic abortion for a 27-year-old mother of four. As a result, Bishop Thomas Olmstead declared an “automatic” excommunication for McBride, and just recently succeeded in…
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…he process of producing a consensus statement in a deeply divided church. Too Much Information Syndrome. Readers don’t care how such high-level documents are written. The murky details of this sorry history read more like an effort to shift the blame and excuse the failings than anything relevant to the final content. Pope Francis has the last say in these matters. He seems to have a penchant for appearing to be more inclusive and welcoming in per…
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…Iowa Republicans thinks should be illegal. (Perhaps because those Iowans took notice of this poll, the results of which seem to indicate that half of American Muslims support the imposition of sharia law, and nearly one-fifth justify violence as a means to this end.) Inventing American Religion: Polls, Surveys, and the Tenuous Quest for a Nation’s Faith Robert Wuthnow Oxford University Press (October 1, 2015) Polls can produce inconsistent, and s…
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…law. “As a Christian politician I cannot leave my conscience outside the door” when voting, Vassallo said. The Independent reported that “some 150-200 protestors gathered outside Parliament to voice their opposition to gay marriage, saying that marriage should be between a man and a woman. Protestors held that they wanted the public to know that not everybody in Malta is in favour of gay marriage.” New Ways Ministry notes: Unlike in many other na…
Read More…must-read report. The results are mixed. To put it politely, among the schools studied there is lots of room for improvement. Take-home message: don’t rely on most religious professionals to help you handle your sexual issues, at least not until the recommendations of the study are implemented. Think twice about confiding in your religious professional about sexual matters since she or he may not have the slightest idea what you are talking about…
Read More…hem,” Ryan says. “They spurred an interest in economics, in the Chicago School and Milton Friedman,” a subject he eventually studied as an undergraduate at Miami University in Ohio. “But it’s a big stretch to suggest that a person is therefore an Objectivist.” “I reject her philosophy,” Ryan says firmly. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to…
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