Religion Dispatches
…like our readers to know about your book? If you buy the book, cut out the correct pages using the Fibonacci sequence, and lay them out on the floor in the shape of a pentagram, it will reveal a secret code allowing you to join the ranks of Illuminati and obtain untold riches and power. This is a very complicated procedure and you may have to buy several copies to get it right….
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…litical zone larger now than ever before. The Modern West’s allegedly life-promoting institutions, precisely because of their excessive materialism, actually foster death. This is not a superficial analysis or critique, and there is much in it that a progressive secularist could agree with. Feminism and sexual ethics frame the issues where the two sides necessarily part company. It is important to recall that Catholic anti-Modernism is not new; it…
Read More…who wants a Christian president, particularly one who would revise the tax code “so we can rejoice together because it would stimulate economic growth.” (Huckabee’s hosted debate, though, this past weekend, was more of a snooze than a circus.) In 2008 Huckabee got a fundraising boost from Kenneth Copeland, Word of Faith megastar. Copeland, at the time under investigation by the Senate Finance Committee for misuse of tax-deductible donor funds, cla…
Read More…er judged a vehicle for courting the religious right in psalmic and hymnic code, Palin is delivering a very clear message to religion-savvy listeners, who hear in her call for “servant’s hearts” the message of twenty years’ worth of “complementarian” sermons, exhorting Christians to be “servant-leaders” and, among women, to view their highest calling in service to male leadership: willing helpmeets to their husbands’, fathers’ and pastors’ authori…
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…f SB 522 becomes law. The bill also highlights the fact that Texas marital code still only identifies “a man and a woman” as the two parties who may apply for a marriage license. Even for Texas Republicans, this bill is a mean-spirited (though not at all unprecedented) attempt to circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling on marriage equality in pursuit of accommodating a vocal minority who claim their faith trumps their neighbors’ pursuit of life, lib…
Read More…nce anywhere between 30 years and life in prison. Their Colonial-era penal code criminalises anyone who “has carnal knowledge of any person against the order of nature.” Earlier this year, Tanzania stopped health clinics from providing HIV services, saying they “cater to homosexuals.” It is believed 33,000 people in Tanzania died from AIDS-related illnesses last year, and 1.4 million are living with the disease nationwide. Romania: Journalist disc…
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…Corinthians”) as ordinary Americans are with the loopholes of the IRS tax code…‘The Art of the Deal,’ his campaign biography by default, is a human billboard for pride and lust…‘I’m a greedy person,’ he told an Iowa audience, ‘I’ve always been greedy.’ Prothero’s explanation is structured around the notion of evangelicals’ loss of their fundamental religious identity through politicization. In supporting Trump, Prothero insists, evangelicals “are…
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…ed to show more intellectual modesty and to acknowledge, with the previous code of Canon Law, that “the bishops, whether teaching individually or gathered in particular councils, are not endowed with infallibility” (Canon 1326). Cardinal Dulles made a crucial theological point in his Presidential address to The Catholic Theological Society of America. He said that the Second Vatican Council “implicitly taught the legitimacy and even the value of d…
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…aren’t so much sober accusations of individuals’ crimes than an insiders’ code for ‘elite liberals.’ The Satanic abuse panic of the 1980s and 90s led to the persecution and false convictions of many innocent people and caused traumatic rifts in communities. The panic involved gothic stories of bloody ceremonies conducted by community-members in black robes, including graphic claims of child and adult sexual abuse and rumors of specific “cult” loc…
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…aints and Church doctors. I developed a bizarre fascination with the Canon Code. But mostly, writing helped me stick with being Catholic. Reading poetry by Catholics and Catholic poetry—the poems of Daniel Berrigan were both—helped the most. That Berrigan was a poet, that he worked as a poet, made all the difference. As I read tribute after tribute to Daniel Berrigan during the weekend following his death, I remembered that presentation he gave on…
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