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Communication v. Excommunication: Catholic Women and the Church

By Mary E. Hunt

…en on the Danube and continues to the present with three women ordained in Boston this summer. These women engage in a variety of ministries—as hospital chaplains, house church leaders, campus ministers, etc.—despite their lack of official recognition, in fact in spite of a recent Vatican pronouncement that excommunicated any women ordained and the bishops who ordain them. Another, in my view more promising, approach is the formation of the Women-…

COVID-19 is Concentrating Wealth Even Further; Can we Talk About the Surplus of Powerlessness in the Faith Community?

By Peter Laarman

…is week House Ways & Means Chair Richard Neal was interviewed at length on Boston’s main public radio station. Representing Western Massachusetts, Rep. Neal is without doubt one of the good guys among the senior members. He choked up when he mentioned that he has 90-year-old uncle, a second father to him, who is suffering from COVID in that hellhole of a soldier’s home in Holyoke. But when Rep. Neal was asked about who he and Speaker Pelosi and ot…

Rising to Heaven in a Secular Rapture: Trump’s Golden Promises

By Eric C. Miller

…think they needed government because the churches often did offer a great number of services. They were tithed, members gave ten percent of their income to sustaining the church, and whatever problem they had, they could take it to the church. It was very central to their lives. At the same time, they sensed that they were Christians in an America that was becoming increasingly non-Christian, so I often heard them say things like, “You can’t say…

‘Manufactured’ Smear Campaign Attempts to Intimidate Church ‘Fasting From Whiteness’— It Didn’t Work

By Frederick Clarkson

…the UCC. He came to Oak Park from previous pastorates in Minnesota and at Boston’s Old South Church, whose origins date to the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. His Old South Church bio reports, “Three of John’s ancestors were tried as witches. Two were hanged. One was acquitted.” Some of the judges were members of the church. Historian Ola Elizabeth Winslow notes how far the church has come regarding “the slow emergence of certain Idea…

Historian Matthew Stewart Upends the Widespread Belief that 19th Century U.S. Christianity Was On ‘The Right Side of History’

By Peter Laarman

…xcommunicated” and went on to found his own 28th Congregational Society in Boston as a haven for freethinkers and committed abolitionists. Which is not to say that Theodore Parker was without his own blind spots. Like many other “enlightened” New Englanders, Parker hated slavery but also clung to racist views, viewing Black people as naturally “docile,” while viewing so-called “Anglo-Saxons” as a superior strain of humanity. Douglass, who found wa…

Virginia Mollenkott: Warrior in the Battle for Evangelical Acceptance of Gays (1932-2020)

By Anne Linstatter

…d generous soul,” said Pamela R. Lightsey, associate dean and professor at Boston University School of Theology. “Another fighter for justice has joined the ancestors. Amen.” Is the Homosexual My Neighbor? Another Christian View (HarperCollins, 1978, rev. 1994) was co-authored with Letha Dawson Scanzoni. Appearing just seven years after the National Organization for women debated and passed a resolution to recognize lesbian rights as “a legitimate…

The Death of a Black Man at the Hands of Black Officers Unveiled Something More Complex Than Whiteness

By Willie Dwayne Francois

…nored violence known as chattel slavery. In fact, U.S. policing started in Boston to control poor Irish immigrants; in the South to maintain the slavocracy; and in the Midwest to intimidate Native Americans into a unique form of segregation. The anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-poor ethos of our policing keeps these histories alive on our streets as disempowered communities live vulnerable to what Achille Mbembe calls necropolitics. The death of M…

Colorado Springs Massacre Captures the Christian Nationalist ‘Monster In The Mirror’

By Lucas Kwong

…isease-bearing foreigner channels White British paranoia about the growing numbers of Eastern European Jews flocking to Britain’s shores from the 1870s onward. In the episode, I point out that Dracula—and vampires by extension—became the quintessential anti-Christian villain, not least because of how they echo conspiracy theories, circulating almost a decade before the publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that powerful Jewish elites…

Are the Culture Wars Over? Look at the States

By Sarah Posner

…pregnant out of wedlock could be summarily fired from her job,” writes Rob Boston, Senior Policy Analyst for Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Similar bills are pending in Arkansas, Kansas, Nevada, and Texas, according to Elise Helgesen, AU’s State Legislative Counsel. After the bill passed, the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation put out a statement praising the veto override, and charging, “There is a concerted effort to di…

Abortion Provider George Tiller Murdered at Church

By Frances Kissling

…ork. Other murdered providers include two young clinic staff at Preterm in Boston, Shannon Lowney and Leanne Nichols, in 1994; Dr. John Britton in Pensacola, Florida in the same year; and Dr. David Gunn in 1993. The National Abortion Federation lists other physicians who have been shot and injured either at home or near their clinics between 1994 and 1997. These murders and shootings (as well as hundreds of incidences of fire bombings and violence…