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7 Religion Stories to Watch in the 2012 Battleground States

By Joanna Brooks

…ral map and the key states that will decide the Romney vs. Obama 2012 contest. While more than a few reporters are heading to Utah these days to chase the Romney-Mormon angle (never mind that the state is definitely Not In Play), religion also promises to play a role in the battleground states this November. Here is a first look at potential stories to watch. Florida: Proof that not all Southern evangelicals dislike Romney. Everyone’s favorite Flo…

“Saints Are Only Human”: Leaving the Church, But Heeding this Pope’s Lessons

By Elizabeth Colmant Estes

…A flock of white-cassocked priests bearing wafers were released in our midst. An assistant who carried a yellow-and-white umbrella accompanied each. The missalette sternly warned against taking communion across denominational borders. I instant-messaged someone in my denomination to find out the status of communion between Reformed churches like mine and the Catholic church. “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” he kindly replied. “Wish I were there.” I turne…

DC Attorney General Goes ‘Religious Freedom’ Route to Investigate Catholic Church

By Patricia Miller

…Unlike the Pennsylvania investigation announced last week by the federal U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Racine has limited authority to prosecute felony crimes. However, in an ironic twist, he will use his authority over nonprofit organizations in the district to pursue the investigation. The Catholic Church has long relied on its nonprofit status to argue, among other things, that as a faith-based charitable rel…

The Problem Isn’t Just Legal Efforts to Overturn Elections, the Problem is Bad Faith

By Daniel Schultz

…nclear is how many Senate Republicans will vote to uphold the objections, i.e., vote not to count Biden’s electors. Sargent uses “bad faith” in more of a legal sense, of course: to act in a dishonest or untrustworthy way. That is certainly true in each of these cases. It’s unclear if Trump actually understands that Pence cannot reject the slates of electors presented to him in his role presiding over the Senate. But he knows he’s lost the election…

Is This Finally the Reckoning for the Catholic Church on Sexual Abuse?

By Patricia Miller

…hen he was the head of the Pittsburgh diocese. But the recently announced U.S. attorney’s investigation marks a major turning point and a potential moment of reckoning in the long-running and sordid sex abuse scandal that first burst into public view with the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” investigation in early 2002. The Justice Department investigation promises to fundamentally reshape the relationship between the U.S. Catholic Church and civil law…

We Went Through Amoris Laetitia Section by Section So You Wouldn’t Have To

By Anthony Adams

…ed Jonathan “as his own soul,” but we don’t find their wedding in scripture. Instead, we get from scripture only David’s Amoris Laetitia—his joy of love. In the second chapter, Pope Francis notes that families have changed. Spouses now share more responsibilities. He hits on his oft-repeated belief that in a marriage personalism is good, but individualism is bad. Also, he notes but offers no explanation for the decreasing number of marriages in ma…

Decoding Scalia’s Secret Hunting Society, From Jägermeister to Medieval Heresy to Buddhist Legend

By Joseph A. P. Wilson

…prominent members of a 300-year-old Bohemian secret society, the Order of St. Hubertus. The owner of the hunting lodge where he passed away is a prominent member of this order, as was Scalia’s traveling companion. The order’s motto “Deum Diligite Animalia Diligentes” means “Honoring God by honoring His creatures.” There’s certainly a bitterness to the notion of “honoring” God’s creatures by killing them—and the Order’s practice of donning traditi…

The Tea Party are Sodomites

By Jay Michaelson

…o stay with him overnight. They reluctantly do so, and Lot makes them a feast. “But before they lay down,” Genesis 19 continues, the men of the city surround Lot’s house and demand that Lot “bring them out to us and we will know them”—clearly understood sexually. Lot goes out and begs them, “please, my brothers, do not do evil,” and offers his own virgin daughters in place of the men. They refuse, saying “we will execute judgment on the one who ha…

A Long History of Blaming the Jews

By Gordon Haber

…is not. But Western culture has frequently defined itself by projecting distasteful qualities, like greed or excessive carnality, onto “Judaism.” A long line of Western thinkers, from Augustine to Marx, have taken this further, judging the value of an idea or concept by its “Jewishness” or lack thereof. Thus “anti-Judaism,” historian David Nirenberg’s term for when Judaism is seen as “a category, a set of ideas and attributes with which non-Jews…

Citing Jewish Law, Florida Synagogue Challenges Abortion Ban — But Here’s the Problem With ‘Religious Requirement’ Arguments

By Rebecca Epstein-Levi

…n an appeal to the value of fetal life—which the tradition characterizes most strongly as a “doubtful” or “potential” soul—but rather on the grounds that, for example, one is not permitted to mutilate one’s body, which ultimately belongs to God. Yet it is precisely this litany of overwhelmingly male voices spilling gallons of ink over the details of conception, pregnancy, and birth, and serving as gatekeepers for the decisions of women and others…