Religion Dispatches
…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…
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…winter has been like that. The south digs out from yet another snowstorm. Boston has drifts that could bury a yeti. The blizzard of the century last month may have missed us New Yorkers by an order of two or three states, but it has been very cold—and those of us in the commuting crowd have learned new applications for the word “endurance.” It was only a matter of time before the remark would be heard. Perhaps you know the one I mean. An anonymou…
Read More…the House side. We all know that the Christian Science mother church is in Boston, but it was still a bit shocking to learn from the Times piece that the Hatch madness is also supported by Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry. Kerry’s spokesperson said it is merely about nondiscrimination against a form of “care” that is recognized by the IRS as a legitimate medical expense. OK, then may I also ask why the IRS still treats prayer as a itemized medical ex…
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…he 2004 election, I was having lunch with Sean O’Malley, the archbishop of Boston, and in that grand profundo basso voice of his asked, “Michael – how did the Democrats lose the Catholic vote?” I did my best to answer at the time—in between bites of tuna fish and hummus—but on the way home I thought to myself that there is a book in the answer to that question. What’s the most important take-home message for readers? If you are a religiously motiv…
Read More…ng notes on parchment and deliver them by raven rather than a world of jet airliners, email and Skype. How many more abuse victims are likely to accumulate (Cruz has called Latin America a continued “playground for pedophiles”) as the commission works on “long-term” solutions? John Allen just reported that the commission, which has been in existence for two years, hasn’t been involved to date in the training on the prevention of sex abuse required…
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…e’s just a history buff… Tuesday night, I had a late night drive home from Boston during which I tuned in to the BBC. They turned to former Democratic senator Doug Jones for comment on Hegseth. (No mention of the tattoos. Politics is serious!) “Unqualified,” said Jones. But, argued the BBC host—paraphrasing here, I was driving, not taking notes—he’s an Army veteran! There are nearly 16 million veterans in the US. Does the BBC think they’re all qua…
Read More…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…
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…ness, for example, when Google decided to subvert the privacy settings of iPhone users? Where was mindfulness when the Street View program ‘sniffed’ for open Wi-Fi connections and surreptitiously collected personal data from local residents? Where was mindfulness when the company decided to consolidate its user privacy policies against the better judgment of consumer groups and over thirty U.S. Attorneys General? Tellingly, none of these issues ap…
Read More…vert to Islam named Misha), but in the following clip, we discuss whether Tsarnaev was a “devout” Muslim: * That segment is here….
Read MoreWriting in the New York Times, Thomas Groome, a professor of theology at Boston College, has a super original, never-before articulated idea about how the Democrats can “reclaim their Catholic base.” The Democrats need to “stop being the party of abortion” to win back the Catholic voters that abandoned the party and sealed Hillary Clinton’s fate, which by my count is approximately installment #1,000 in the apparently never-ending series “White Du…
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