Religion Dispatches
…to us as a sounding board, and advice giver. He is great. We are going to Boston on November 5th. There is a local team who are organizing it who are hungry and keen. How do you address concerns that by calling this church, you may be giving people the impression that Sunday Assembly is equipped to provide actual pastoral care? Jones: We have always said that Sunday Assembly is a phased growth into a full church like structure. At Sunday Assembly…
Read More…t Ken Hutchins, a lifelong friend of Mitt Romney who served with Romney in Boston-area LDS Church leadership positions, will deliver a prayer at the RNC.]— folks in the viewing audience will no doubt be stunned by just how startingly normal it sounds. For a preview, allow me to do a little Mormon explaining (Mo-splaining?) of LDS prayer forms. LDS people are taught to adopt and adapt the general model of the Lord’s Prayer in the New Testament for…
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…ggested Trump won the Catholic vote by 52% to 45%. Now, as you may recall, Boston College’s Thomas Groome argued in a recent New York Times opinion piece that Clinton’s loss of the Catholic vote constituted a “watershed” and he counseled the Democratic Party to stop being so abortiony to retake the Catholic vote. So, if Clinton actually won that Catholic vote, does that mean the Dems should double down on their pro-choice position? Of course, Groo…
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…of 139 schools studied with regard to the availability of contraceptives. Boston College is under scrutiny for hosting a talk on homosexuality and Christianity, then praised for tacking crucifixes back up in classrooms. So it goes, year in and year out with the Newmanites stirring up little tempests on Catholic campuses. They win some, they lose most. One of their favorite targets is Eve Ensler’s popular play, The Vagina Monologues. They actually…
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…f course, the questions Huffington and the DNC raise are not new. In 2007, Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi scrutinized “Romney’s Honesty Problem” on abortion, and John McCain’s presidential campaign developed an anti-Romney ad strikingly similar to the DNC’s. But this time around, as attention continues to consolidate on Romney as once-and-future frontrunner, it seems clear that the honesty meme is going to stick. It may in fact be the issue…
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…ogies.” Interestingly, back in February, Equinox Fitness unveiled an ad in Boston depicting rather scantily clad nuns. Unlike Playboy, Equinox did not back down despite the outcry of the Catholic hierarchy in the United States. They stated, “The ads capture the energy and artistry of the well-conditioned body in a thought-provoking fashion, blending fantasy and impact.” Indeed, both of these instances highlight the defamation of women in media, fr…
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…the story of the Tsarnaev brothers who were convicted of terrorism in the Boston marathon bombings in 2013. The older brother especially was something of an underachiever, having essentially failed at all his endeavors. In Matar’s case, he also had failed academically and had been working at a Marshall’s clothing store in a job that did not inspire him. In the off-hours he worked out at a gym and was trying to learn how to box, though some of the…
Read More…religion coverage, Silk pays closer attention to blogs associated with the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, US News & World Report, and USA Today. This is all brilliant in its quiet, descriptive way. Silk is especially mindful of the ways in which we are bombarded by news and information from the time we wake to the time we retire. He has structured his response by simply walking us through his day, reminding us that we are always (both actively…
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…ions between Russia and the US is about occur.’” In an email exchange, Rob Boston, Editor of Church & State, spoke about this connection between Russian operatives and the religious right. America’s homegrown theocrats are increasingly looking to Russia and other authoritarian former East Bloc nations as models for the United States. These countries tend to be homophobic, xenophobic and Islamophobic. They’re often run by quasi-dictators who are hi…
Read More…lic bolster of the president, although noted cultural warriors like former Boston Mayor Raymond Flynn and Harvard’s Mary Ann Glendon have served in the role. And Trump himself reportedly said that he wanted to give Callista the position mainly to get Newt out of his hair. But imagine a scenario in which a Democrat nominated as ambassador to a highly conservative religious entity that bans divorce a woman who was not only her husband’s third wife,…
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