Religion Dispatches
…of a real estate transaction because of their sexual orientation. Via the Boston Globe: Coakley’s office weighed in on a case pending in Worcester Superior Court in which a married gay couple, James Fairbanks and Alain Beret, contend that the diocese refused to sell them a historic mansion in Northbridge, which had been used for years by a church-affiliated nonprofit retreat center, because the couple might host same-sex weddings there. Fairbanks…
Read More
…bleachers, and eight speakers lined up to address the crowd. The audience numbered about 30. Even Timothy Dolan at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, on the kickoff day of the Fortnight, only gathered 250 people. The nuns got that many in small towns across the country at stop after stop. The bus trip also proved that there is a deep hunger across generations for this kind of faith-based organizing. The crowd in DC was surprisingly younger…
Read More
…artnerships to be led by Joshua Dubois, a 26 year-old poli-sci graduate of Boston University and Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School who has also served as a part-time pastor at a Pentecostal Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts. According to the press release on the White House Web site, the new Office will have four priorities: * The Office’s top priority will be making community groups an integral part of our economic recovery and povert…
Read More
…Fuller Theological Seminary, and Nancy Ammerman, professor of sociology at Boston University, critiquing assumptions about “brainwashing,” with statements from an anti-cultist with no advanced degrees in the relevant fields of religious studies, psychology, or sociology. Joe Szimhart, a former deprogrammer, now an “exit counselor” and “a cult information specialist for more than 25 years,” was quoted as an authority on “brainwashing.” On April 17,…
Read More
…ike Hayek, Gibran spent most of his life and career outside of the country of his birth. Between his last visit to Lebanon in 1910 and his untimely death in 1931, Gibran was for all intents and purposes American, part of a thriving immigrant community in first Boston and then New York, where he lived, painted, and wrote in a studio apartment on East 10th Street. Adapting Gibran’s most famous book into a narrative film won’t be easy, which is why i…
Read More
…he refers to are a real grievance. Shea tells me about a Jesuit priest at Boston College who would say to his students “Who is your God? I’ll tell you who your God is. Tell me what you spend most of your time with. That’s your God.” For Father Shea, the Holy Trinity has been replaced in the hearts of students by the secular trinity of shopping, computers and TV. But even Father Shea uses tech in his RCIA class. Damien thinks the use of the videos…
Read More
…. The smart money is on him being promoted and relocated, as happened with Boston’s Cardinal Bernard Law and other clerics who have contributed so actively to the rapid exodus of members from Catholic parishes. At some point, these sorts of executive employees become too expensive to maintain. It becomes cost effective to put a golden parachute on their mitres and wish them well. The obviously forced resignation of Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas Cit…
Read More…it back to Reading Abbey just in time for St. James Day. A school board in Virginia has removed the Sherlock Holmes novel A Study in Scarlet from its sixth-grade reading lists because they found the book to be anti-Mormon. The Boston Globe reminds us all that the two Mormon GOP presidential candidates, Mitt Romney and John Huntsman, have different takes on their Mormon faith. Televangelist Jim Bakker now has his own breakfast cereal. It’s organic…
Read More
…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…
Read More…preme Court in Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Group of Boston, a 1995 case in which the court found that “modern public accommodations laws are well within the State’s usual power to enact when a legislature has reason to believe that a given group is a target of discrimination, and they do not, as a general matter, violate the First or Fourteenth Amendments.” Oregon’s own public accommodations law, Avakian went on, encompasses…
Read More