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Confession Fail: iPhone App Controversy Muddies the Sacramental Waters

…nfession with a priest. However, it has seemed easy enough for the average user to misunderstand the developers’ intention that the app be used as an incentive to go to church. Indeed, enough that Vatican officials were moved to issue a statement yesterday making clear that use of the Confession app—or any technological devise—cannot substitute for the sacrament properly offered by a Roman Catholic priest. Kreager is quick to affirm the Vatican’s…

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Crying Witch: Learning From the O’Donnell “Dabbling” Debacle

…ith someone who said that he was a witch. The problem is, when it comes to use of the word “witch,” real witches can be nearly as varied as those of novels, movies, and television. Most vocal in their use of the term are segments of the pagan Wiccan communities. Among contemporary Wiccans there is often (following the logic of identity politics) an effort to reclaim the term “witch” as meaning exclusively those of their nature-revering, goddess-ro…

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Did Jesus Help Ghanaian Women with Birth Control?

…ive use amongst women of the Kassena-Nankana ethnic group in Ghana. She focuses on a study of contraceptive use and childbearing amongst women who attended evangelical churches: To their amazement, they found that female Christian converts were three times as likely to use family planning as women who retained their traditional African faith, and had significantly smaller families. The churches certainly didn’t promote family planning. But, despit…

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Park 51 and RLUIPA, Or, Conservatives Hoisted On Their Petard

…nd Institutionalized Persons Act, arguing that it “protects religious land uses from discrimination.” Thus because of Republican legislation, conservative opponents of the Park 51 project have had to fight not on legal grounds, but on the far weaker notion that the community center’s organizers should build elsewhere out of respect for the Ground Zero site. That, it should be said, is hardly a compelling argument.** Or as Melissa Rogers puts it on…

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How to Slow Down the Rush to War: What Obama Should Do About Syria

…t crisis in Syria, in which the U.N. is blocked from acting decisively because Russia and China will use their vetoes against any action that imperils Assad, President Obama should call a conclave of the world’s other countries, all of them, and let them together decide on what should be done with regard to saving the people of Syria from its rogue regime. The specific use of chemical weapons should be referred to the World Court for possible tria…

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Two Wars and No Peace in Sight: The Role of Faith-Based Pacifism

…e is structural violence. Certainly, there is physical violence such as spouse or child abuse. But structural forms of violence systematically affect whole groups of people. This type of violence occurs when structures—such as an authoritarian regime, a patriarchal system, or racial segregation laws—limit a group’s opportunities and life chances. Such structures do violence to people by systematically oppressing them, by treating them in a degradi…

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Anti-Choice Activists to Use Planned Parenthood Vote as Campaign Issue

…ecades,” a false statement that even got it embroiled in litigation, and caused a group of Cincinnati-area nuns to call on it “to stop making the false claim that Congressman Steve Driehaus (OH-01) voted to expand federal funding of abortion.” Similarly, Charmaine Yoest of AUL falsely called the final health care law “the biggest expansion of abortion since Roe v. Wade.” Driehaus lost, as did about half of the House Democratic pro-life caucus, alt…

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God in the Inauguration: JFK, Bush, and Obama

…rward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. Not because history runs on the wheels of inevitability; it is human choices that move events. Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul. When our Founders declared a new order of the ages; when soldiers died in wave upo…

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That Mercenary Feeling: What the Apparently Unlimited Use of “Contractors” Says About American Empire in Afghanistan and Iraq

…nley McChrystal, acknowledged recently that we are losing ground there because (surprise) ordinary Afghans appear to resent our casual killing in their country. In view of this you might think Gen. McChrystal would be worried about the impact of so many mercenaries; if he his, he is doing nothing to change it. But here is the part of Glanz’s piece I particularly like. He quotes Frederick Barton of the Center for Strategic and International Studies…

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From Engravings to Ultrasounds: The Politics of Imaging the Womb

…In comparison, Hunter betrayed no interest in the gender of the children housed in the uteruses he anatomized. Access to living images of the fetus facilitates our own obsession with gendering babies, even before their birth. But imaging technology also introduces difficult questions. Twenty-five states have passed laws regulating the use of ultrasound imaging when a woman seeks an abortion. In Louisiana, Texas, and Wisconsin, the law requires an…

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