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Is Football a Pro-Life Sport?

By Marian Ronan

…enty-three top US Catholic colleges and universities field football teams: Boston College, the Catholic University of America, Fordham, Georgetown, Holy Cross, Marquette, the University of Dayton, the University of Notre Dame, Villanova, and Xavier in Cincinnati. (Anna Maria College in Massachusetts, recently protected from Mrs. Kennedy, also has a team.) In 2009, Notre Dame football made more than $15 million from its television contract, and ret…

“The Gift of Gay”: Father Matthew Kelty, Confessor to Thomas Merton, Dies at 96

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…re unstable world of human forms. Born Charles Richard Kelty Jr., in South Boston (in 1915, just like Merton), his parents were no artists. His father was an engineer and a machinist from New Jersey; he was arguably the most precocious of their four children. He was educated in public schools in Milton, Massachusetts, where by his own confession he acquired his lifelong taste for poetry. In other words, unlike Merton, he did not have art foisted u…

Louis C.K., Paige Patterson, and the White Male Forgiveness Charade

By Dianna Anderson

…n preaching when he was a teenager; Louis C.K. is an acerbic comedian from Boston who grew up speaking Spanish in Mexico and has made a career out of being an awkward and offensive comedian. Despite their differences, these two men have arrived at starkly similar situations in the #MeToo era, with jobs lost, reputations destroyed, and a trail of hurting women in their wake. Both, too, are depending on cultural narratives of forgiveness to revive t…

Satanic “Black Mass” at Harvard Excites Conservatives

By Joseph Laycock

…dent Drew G. Faust beseeching him to halt the event and the Archdiocese of Boston released a statement condemning it. The controversy demonstrates the cycle of appropriation that often occurs between religious authorities longing for a direct encounter with extraordinary evil and dissenters who perform the script of evil. In an e-mail, Greaves described the black mass as a “non-story,” insisting that it’s meant as a performance of his religious cu…

What is Interfaith Cooperation For?

By Eboo Patel

…Huffington Post article on the urgency of interfaith cooperation after the Boston bombings. As religious diversity continues to grow both in demographic fact and in salience in our public discourse, and as interfaith efforts expand, it is more important than ever to engage in a thoughtful exchange about the purpose of interfaith programs. I wish to use this space to advance my view of what interfaith cooperation is for. The ideas I present below h…

Winners and Losers in the “Visitation” of American Nuns?

By Patricia Miller

…d a central contention of Catholic conservatives: that the drop-off in the number of nuns is due to the modernization of the many orders who left their cloisters and shed their habits to tackle social justice problems in the real world. The report said that “the very large numbers of religious in the 1960s was a relatively short-term phenomenon that was not typical of the experience of religious life through most of the nation’s history.” In seeki…

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-…

Revealing Joseph Smith’s (Well-Known) Polygamy Doesn’t Address the LDS Church’s Bigger Problem

By Joanna Brooks

…feel in my bones. “I am the Relief Society president in my singles ward in Boston,” she told me, indicating her role as an appointed spiritual leader of a community of college-aged young women. “People are really struggling to make sense of all the problems in Mormon history and theology and to hang on in spite of them. What do I tell them?” I wished in that moment—as I so often do—that these very real, very searching questions found greater suppo…

Bishops Elect Moderate to Lead Pro-Life Committee

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston has been elected as the chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Pro-Life Activities, beating out Archbishop Allen Vigneron of Detroit. You may remember that Cardinal O’Malley—who regularly attends the national March for Life and has called it a “tragedy” any time abortion restrictions are lifted—nevertheless drew criticism in 2009 from some in the anti-abortion movement for not only permit…

Gay, Black, Republican, Baptist Preacher, Rev. Peter Gomes, 1942-2011

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…oaring laughter and applause. Gomes was used to pissing people off. As the Boston Globe notes: “He was the first black minister of Memorial Church and the only gay, black, Republican, Baptist preacher most people would ever meet.” If that’s not a mixture sure to piss people off, I’m not sure what is. Dr. Gomes left us this week at the tender age of 68. He has left behind an amazing array of written and spoken words for us to continue to enjoy, eve…