Religion Dispatches
…write the same thing today. Since that piece was published in 2002, in the American church, some of those measures were taken, and although there are many cases that still need adjudication or resolution, the path to rectify the sexual abuse has, and continues to be addressed. As Thomas Reese, S. J notes, it took seventeen years for the American church to address the sexual abuse scandal properly. I recommend his article for its judiciousness in e…
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…or exhorted on homosexuals to repent or be punished by God before the microphone was snatched away one of Kato’s supporters. It might have seemed that the last person the activist’s friends would turn to for support at the moment would be another religious leader. Especially given that the church in Uganda was at the head of the drive for the draconian anti-homosexuality bill still pending in Parliament. But 79-year-old Bishop Christopher Senyonjo…
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…ate any displeasure with the Israeli government’s gratuitous insult of the American vice president). Other conservative pro-Israel organizations, both Jewish and Christian, soon followed suit, ignoring (as they always have) the settlements provocation and blaming the American administration for the disagreement. The progressive pro-Israel group J Street was virtually alone in recognizing the crisis as generated by the Israeli government’s provocat…
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…information was so troubling, it convinced one attendee, Ken Stern of the American Jewish Committee, to volunteer to summarize the information, concerns, and a warning of impending violence. Stern presented the report to federal authorities just a few weeks before the Federal Building in Oklahoma City was destroyed. Stern, disheartened by the failure of government officials to act on the information, turned his report into a book, A Force Upon th…
Read More…g a lot of energy responding to a blog post I recently wroteabout a record number of creationist bills introduced in state legislatures since January. I write numerous posts about intelligent design and the Discovery Institute’s disingenuous attacks on evolution education, so I’m not sure why this particular post has gotten them so hot and bothered. First, David Klinghoffer had a bit of a snit on DI’s Evolution News last week over the issue of pee…
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…Connelly observes in his important new book, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style, one of the most striking features of a contemporary Religious Studies department is its easy acceptance of permanent pluralism as the necessary starting point for religious reflection. It’s easy to miss how new, how important, and how startling that starting point really is. Gone are the days when even conservative Christians dream of the eventual “conversio…
Read More…-backward country preacher spouting off about his xenophobic fears of Arab-Americans and/or Islam? Indifference, ridicule, pity — any of these would’ve been an appropriate response to this fool. Arguing him down outside the center would’ve been fine, too, for the more passionate among us. But throwing the man in jail truly risks turning a gasbag into a poster boy for the fight against governmental assaults on free speech. What’s more, it’ll only…
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…es to the ‘aughties that number rose from 16% to 21%—more than one in five Americans. Meanwhile the GOP has, since January, been busy trying to shrink the very definition of rape to only deem those who suffered “forcible rape” eligible to receive federal funding for an abortion. Forcible. Not statutory rape. These are the kinds of distinctions they find it crucial to draw. What, you thought they’d give up after the public outcry in February? Ah,…
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…ca is staggering under the sheer weight of its white underclass, which now numbers some sixty million. Generally unable to read at a functional level, they are easily manipulated by corporate-political interests to vote against advances in health and education, and even more easily mustered in support of any proposed military conflict, aggressive or otherwise. One-third of their children are born out of wedlock, and are unemployable by any contemp…
Read More…bsite from which he claimed to get his information. He pulled out his cell phone: “Freddie!” he said to an unseen interlocutor. “Will you find me what that website for the saucer, the prophecy, for tomorrow night – the 14th?” He paused, then yelled: “THE SAUCER! All I want is access to the information so I can give it to someone else.” He then recited the web address of a YouTube video. It was my own searches, however, that turned up Goodchild’s w…
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