Religion Dispatches
…ngs related to sexuality, especially by anyone who could be considered an “official” Catholic, like nuns. In 1983 it forced Sister Agnes Mansour to leave the Sisters of Mercy because she defended her role as head of Michigan’s Medicaid program, which paid for abortions for poor women. When 24 nuns signed a statement that was printed in the New York Times in 1984 saying that there was a diversity of Catholic opinion on abortion, the Vatican hounded…
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…the organization supports reparative therapy, Jao said, “We don’t have any official position on that.” When asked whether they approve of advice given to gay people to date members of the opposite sex, he said, “We don’t have a standard care or practice. We are trying to change that.” But to what, he would not say. How does one of the largest and most influential campus ministries in the country, with over 1,000 chapters across 667 campuses that r…
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…alized and those who dedicate their lives to help them. In Chicago, they visited Mercy Housing, where Mercy Sisters and collaborators “develop, finance and operate affordable, program-enriched housing communities for families, seniors, and people with special needs.” None of this is glamorous work, and the dining is not gourmet, but it is the stuff of what will move this country from greed to generosity. Many women, including nuns, are in the vang…
Read More…driven by the advances in birth control—Catholics have largely ignored the official teaching of the Church on sexual relations within marriage and outside marriage. Teaching delivered by the celibate clergy on sexuality was seen as naïve, impractical and unresponsive to the experience of sexually-active Catholics. This was true in the early stages of the post-Humanae Vitae era and in later years when the Church refused to endorse condoms to help p…
Read More…harges that the votes from some municipalities were ignored or miscounted. Official complaints have been filed against five deputies and activists who “took the hall of the legislative chamber in protest.” A group of Christian pastors has vowed to continue fighting, saying that marriage by same-sex couples is counter to “the law of God” and cannot go unpunished. La Union quotes Daniel Aguilar Santoyo, a leader of the pastors’ group, saying “”From…
Read More…en it comes to his own candidacy, Romney is willing to confront this quasi-official religious test by defending the free exercise clause and the prohibition on religious tests for office. But he was silent on the establishment clause. Last night he said nothing about the citizenry’s religious freedom, the separation of church and state, and where the line between public expression of religion by elected officials and state endorsement of religion…
Read More…es the state Supreme Court an opportunity to clearly reaffirm the right of official proponents to legally defend voter-passed initiatives they successfully enact, particularly when public officials abdicate their constitutional duties by refusing to enforce and defend the law.” But Jennifer C. Pizer, National Marriage Project Director for Lambda Legal, contends that state law does not empower activists to bring a lawsuit in support of ballot measu…
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…appropriate,” said Austin Rabbi Alan Freedman, one of the panelists. That “official theology” has long been evident at the highest reaches of Texas state government. Abbott, a Roman Catholic with Christian nationalist leanings, has made no secret of his opposition to abortion. At a 2016 anti-abortion gathering, he vowed to make Texas “the strongest pro-life state in the United States of America.” Paxton, a Baptist, has made false and tendentious c…
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…r words, the ACLU was arguing on first amendment grounds that Rowan County officials were favoring Christianity. In response, these North Carolina lawmakers proclaimed that the first amendment did not apply to North Carolina. The wildly overshooting lawmakers garnered immediate media attention (“North Carolina May Declare Official State Religion Under New Bill,” reported The Huffington Post) and alarmed those who felt that Christian theocrats had…
Read More…pic for the foreseeable future; the fact that discussion of this matter is officially verboten means there can be no official clarification, and even external corroboration of facts may be slow. For instance, though unofficial documentation exists of a survey about perceptions of temple in the 1980s (I love the question about whether people fell asleep during the endowment ceremony), I couldn’t find verification of reports of a recent survey of ot…
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