Religion Dispatches
…o hasten my journey there, people of other religious persuasions are quite welcome to believe I’m hell-bound. I disagree, and even if I’m wrong I have never understood the appeal of Pascal’s Wager anyway. (On this, I’m with the atheists: no god that damns anybody eternally can be trusted, much less loved.) Getting back to Left Behind, I’m disturbed by how almost Nietzschean the films are in turning conventional Christian morality on its head. It i…
Read More
…ioners of weird religion aren’t all ones that we (liberals anyway) want to welcome into our homes, but in these essays Sharlet is careful to notice the humanity of the people he is writing about. In good liberal fashion, there would seem to be no one beyond redemption (though some might need a bit more atonement than others). The placement of the first essay, “Sweet Fuck All, Colorado” (you’ll have to read it to get the title), is significant. H…
Read More…73. The denomination began for the simple reason that LGBT people were not welcome in mainstream congregations—not openly, anyway. Certainly, a large majority of music ministers in mainstream churches were serving in the closet, but not many churches were happy to have openly LGBT people in their pews, much less their pulpits. It’s easy for us to forget, in our Will & Grace, Ellen DeGeneres, Adam Lambert world that LGBT people used to huddle toge…
Read More
…point on the matter, underscoring that gay men, even if celibate, were not welcome in the priesthood. In November 2005, the Vatican, through the Congregation for Catholic Education, published the Instruction Concerning the Criteria for the Discernment of Vocations with regard to Persons with Homosexual Tendencies in view of their Admission to the Seminary and to Holy Orders, with the following central message: …this Dicastery, in accord with the C…
Read More…g men (I was the only women in the class and I did not receive the warmest welcome on record) how to handle confessions. The priest professor role-played a variety of penitents while the students took turns acting the part of the priest. One young man decomposed in the chair when the penitent confessed her alleged sin of oral sex. (Note the priest could not bring himself to act out a man who engaged in oral sex.) When pressed for a response, the y…
Read More
…ou can’t even use the word LGBT. They’ll use something like “Spectrum” or “Welcome Ministry.” It has to be so coded that it doesn’t ruffle any feathers, and that’s not the case for women. And that’s very sad. To me, LGBT people are sometimes treated like lepers. One of the things I’ve learned in this informal ministry is the unbelievable things priests, sisters, brothers and lay associates will say to LGBT Catholics. It’s just horrifying. One of t…
Read More…ting for Pope Francis to change the Catholic Church. The unexpectedly warm welcome given to gay Catholics in the mid-synod report raised hopes that a major change in the church’s attitude, if not its teaching, was just around the corner. The fact that those changes were scrapped—along with language acknowledging value in “irregular” partnerships and a possible opening for divorced Catholics to receive communion—in the final document shouldn’t come…
Read More…urse, has set the hair aflame. Conservatives are pouting that they aren’t “welcome” in New York; Sean Hannity even had a tantrum about moving elsewhere. Cardinal Timothy Dolan writes a litany of St. Patrick’s activities “respecting life,” asking at the end, “does any of this seem ‘extremist’ to you?” The March for Life is still a big deal. One of the nation’s two major parties supports it, and will later in the week that party will consider whethe…
Read More…5:44. Here the word “agapao” means, according to Strong’s Concordance, “to welcome, to entertain, to be fond of, to love dearly.” Nothing there about loving someone in the sense that you want to destroy them. So, no, Hannity does not “love” his enemy – he clearly hates his enemy and yet will proclaim that he is a Christian. But, Hannity doesn’t stop digging his own religious grave right there. He continues: HANNITY: I want them to see — they want…
Read More
…ate title would you give the book? I often joked that the title should be “Welcome to Insane World” because none of the pieces fit neatly together: “Darwinist”-spouting teachers were preachers’ kids; the “atheist” plaintiffs taught Sunday school; the “activist” judge was a Bush-appointed Republican; and the people labeled “liars” were willing to go to jail for the truth. How do you feel about the cover? We had originally chosen a different photogr…
Read More