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On Using Religious Language in Public, Right and Left

By Daniel Schultz

…ide in her report from the Values Voters Summit: David and Goliath and the story of Esther. Both fit the conservative framework of opposition to overwhelming power very nicely. It’s no wonder they keep coming back to them time and again. We don’t do nearly as good a job on the liberal side. Take, for example, this piece by CAP Senior Fellow Sam Fulwood titled “Loving Thy Neighbor: Immigration Reform and Communities of Faith“. It’s a perfectly serv…

Days of Reckoning for the Philadelphia Archdiocese

By Anthea Butler

…ers to remain in its ranks. The local Catholic dioceses of Kansas City and St. Louis have upped the ante by going after the organization that exists to help the abused, SNAP, subpoenaing its records of over 100,000 people who have been interviewed about sexual abuse over the years. Juxtaposing the past Holy Week against the lurid details of the abuse has been agonizing. When priests pass boys around for sex at church summer camp, there is no doub…

Christmas Candy Jesus, Black Magi, Jewish Xmas

By Michael J. Altman

…research group finds that only 37% of Americans include Jesus in their Christmas festivities. One small group of Christians think this enough to warrant executing Santa. Jolly ole St. Nicholas’ home town was in Turkey and the town of Demre is cashing in on their favorite son. The story of the nativity through social networks. Jamaicans are using the first patois version of the Gospel of Luke in this year’s Christmas celebrations. Under continued t…

History in the Making: Religion, Race and Gender in the Presidential Election

By Peter J. Paris

…ician running for office drawing crowds of 100,000 persons as Obama did in St. Louis over the weekend? Most important, Obama’s campaign has caught the imagination of the nation. He is now within reach of becoming the next president. It seems almost surreal that he should have nearly 3.5 million contributors to the largest campaign treasury in history. This measure of mass support seems as miraculous as Nelson Mandela being released from prison, pr…

Eulogy, Corrected: Father Matthew Came Out as Gay 30 Years Earlier

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…t was to let Matthew’s words be heard as they deserve to be. I tried, as best I could, to stay out of the way. A very dear friend and former student, Dr. Michael Bever, to whom I owe my own introduction to Father Matthew some years ago, has reminded me of some things I either failed to say about him, or else said wrongly. Matthew’s, as I think he and I both agree, is a life worth trying to get just right. So this corrective is an important one, as…

Adult Realism and the State of This Union

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…es. This was the very sort of thing that led Chief Justice Roberts to suggest last year in Alabama that Supreme Court justices had little place at such partisan affairs; his decision to attend the State of the Union address may have been, in part, a response to this most welcome gesture toward bipartsanship. It was telling, too, that the most partisan of our current justices (Alito, Scalia, and Thomas) chose to stay away. Still, this decision did…

Size Matters According to New Study

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…maller brains” (Houston Chronicle) In fact, that’s a somewhat selective list of stories on the findings of a highly selective study. Involving less than three hundred people, the study looked at the brain volume of a group of people it divvied up according to religious affiliation (Protestant, Catholic, “born again” and unaffiliated). (Un)born again Protestants apparently won the brain volume prize. Bracketing the question of who devises studies…

Cornel West: Do Not “Santa-Clausify” MLK Jr.

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…udience. What is a sermon without a church? Practice, or prayer. In this last gesture, West made the moment, and the movement, his own. He has identified himself with the Blues sensibility many times, and has more recently identified himself as a “tragicomic” thinker in the tradition of Checkhov (and of American Pragmatism). Tragicomedy is a matter of cadence and of performance, striking the precise note struck by the Synoptic gospels, in West’s r…

Is Karen Armstrong Right? Was Religion Always About Belief or Not?

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…acticing Catholics” or “practicing Jews,” but to speak of “practicing Protestants” just sounds funny. They don’t practice. Not the old way. If one ponders what the Protestants endeavored to take away, then they are almost all matters of materiality and attendant practices: holy water and incense, statues and frescoes, saints and pilgrimages, monasteries and celibacy, Maryology, “real presence” in the Eucharist. At the conclusion of the Reformation…

The Byzantine Bush Tell-All

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…n the literal sense of that term—his lack of imagination, his adolescent mistrust of intellectualism, his swaggering braggadocio—nor am I interested in the meanness of the memoirs. Rather, I am interested in the history of such things, the fact that there is virtually a genre to which such things belong. The classic example of such a tell-all memoir is Procopius of Caesarea’s posthumous recollection of the Byzantine emperor, Justinian, and his con…