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Catholic Bishops’ Religious Liberty Fight Enables Anti-Jewish Discrimination (Updated)

By Patricia Miller

…“shares the parents’ religious beliefs and moral convictions.” To date, a number of Catholic Charity adoption agencies, including those in Illinois, Boston, San Francisco, and most recently Buffalo, New York, have shut down rather than offer adoption services to same-sex couples. They’ve then turned around and accused civil authorities of putting them out of business because of anti-Catholic animus. Catholic Social Services (CSS) of Philadelphia…

Welcome to the RNC’s Elmer Gantry Tent Revival

By Paula Cooey

…several times a day before writing the book which was ultimately banned in Boston and excoriated from pulpits throughout the land. The Trump GOP convention seems for all the world to be loosely orchestrated as an odd sort of tent revival. Its choreographers have put it together around the personal narratives of individuals who have suffered loss for one reason or another, ranging from undocumented immigration (Sabine Durden, whose son Dominic was…

Vatican Seeks Virgin Amidst All This Sexual Impropriety

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…authority. Accusations of such abuse are now becoming global in scope—from Boston, to Bavaria, to Ireland—and the moral challenge created by these matters is compounded by the apparent collusion of church officialdom in several overlapping cover-ups. While it is tempting to go for the papal jugular in the face of such scandals—especially among those who are most adamantly opposed, not just to these two anti-modern papacies, but to the entire archi…

Predicting the Future of Religion: A Thought Experiment

By Ed Simon

…the Curia. Expect the next Pope to be from Manila or Yaoundé and not from Boston or Chicago. Whether this will herald a more progressive church or a reactionary one is a matter of debate. Right now Pope Francis is attempting to extend his influence beyond the end of his papacy as much as possible by selecting the cardinals who will elect the next pope. As it stands now there are a few things that may happen upon Pope Francis’ passing: the Church…

The End of the Religious Right? Not So Fast

By Frederick Clarkson

…Daniels, a possible 2012 GOP presidential contender, backed right off. Rob Boston, who has written about the religious right for two decades concluded that “Daniels’ quick retreat” indicates “that the religious right has lost none of its political punch.” Politicians and their vassals understandably wish that contentious matters, over which there is little agreement (and over which they have no control), would miraculously disappear. And pols from…

Obama’s Muslim Problem—And Ours

By William D. Hart

…ple, to complicate the image of who Muslims are, to accent their long, pre-Boston Tea Party, pre-revolutionary history in America. What better way to exemplify the new politics he claims to embody? Item: Two Muslim women dressed in hijab (a traditional form of dress that leaves only the face and hands exposed) are barred from sitting behind Obama at a campaign rally by over zealous campaign volunteers. The women complain publicly about their ill t…

What Masterpiece Cakeshop Oral Arguments Suggest About the Future of LGBT Discrimination

By Patrick Hornbeck

…ociety is clearly continuing to wrestle with an issue on which substantial numbers of Americans continue to differ, usually for religious reasons. Masterpiece Cakeshop gets at a number of disputed questions, but regardless of which way the justices rule, others will likely go unanswered. Beginning to thread this needle will likely be the task of Justice Kennedy, who did not tip his hand in today’s arguments about how he intends to reconcile his la…

“Future of Babylon” Project Preserves History to Some, Ushers in “End Times” to Others

By Bill Berkowitz

…April 10, 2003, one day after U.S. forces established control over Iraq, a number of Iraqis took to doing, to paraphrase Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld “what a free people do”; running amok and looting whatever wasn’t permanently nailed in place. One of the hardest hit targets was Baghdad’s Iraq Museum. When asked about the looting, Rumsfeld—then enjoying matinee idol-type status—made light of the situation, saying: “the images you are seein…

Image of Mitt Romney at a podium looking down with blurred sign in background that reads "Conservatives"

Mitt Romney, the Public Face of Mormonism, Reckons with His Alienation From a Radicalized GOP and His Role in Enabling it

By Benjamin E. Park

…y met with a group of prominent evangelical leaders in his home outside of Boston in late 2006. Yet what he hoped would be a disciplined exchange concerning interdenominational cooperation instead turned into an “inquisition.” Jerry Falwell pressed him on Latter-day Saint beliefs concerning God. Richard Land wondered why Mormons had rejected the Nicene Creed. And Franklin Graham critiqued him for appointing two judges who were gay. In the end, Rom…

Are the Southern Baptists, America’s Largest Evangelical Denomination, About to Get Even More Conservative?

By Chrissy Stroop

…wife to stay with her husband and to try to change him through prayer. As Boston University Professor emerita Nancy Ammerman and the SBC moved in divergent ideological directions in the 1980s, she became a scholar of the denomination she grew up in. As a young sociologist, Ammerman sought to understand the processes that fuel a denominational split, and her efforts yielded critical documentation of how the “conservative resurgence” played out. On…