Religion Dispatches
…h neighborhood join a gang? Why does a high school student in a quiet town sign on to terrorism groups who preach supremacy? Why does a young woman abandon her family and future and become a suicide bomber? In the months that followed, Ndugwa and a friend who was with him that night in the stadium founded the UMYDF. He has been involved in trying to fight the lure of terrorist groups with what he describes as the true teachings of Islam. They work…
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…se tale, we learn, the Buddha keeps his genitals “hidden in a sheath” as a sign of his detachment from the world. Yet he seems far from detached when a group prostitutes taunt that he “lacks a functioning male member.” The fifth-century text continues: When the Buddha heard this, [his organ] gradually emerged like that of a horse king. When it first appeared it was like the bodily organ of an eight-year-old-boy, and it gradually grew into the shap…
Read More…rrangements with their insurers. The fact that the bishops refused to even sign on to the so-called compromise shows that for them the whole point of the exercise was to make a political statement about the moral unacceptability of non-procreative sex (especially for unmarried women), to save face about the fact that most Catholics use contraception, and to gin up “religious liberty” concerns that would backstop their campaign against same-sex mar…
Read More…s like LGBT advocate Sister Jeannine Gramick. (For the record, a 2009 NCAN sign-on letter in support of a priest who was threatened with excommunication for supporting women’s ordination received the signature of well over 100 well known women religious social justice leaders, including Gramick, and Sisters Donna Quinn, Joan Chittister, Mary Ann Cunningham, Maureen Fiedler, Ivone Gebara, and Theresa Kane.) What bothers Carey besides the fact that…
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…rtlesville Examiner-Enterprise…” To some extent, questions like this are designed to cover up the fact that the reporter does not know the answer to her own question and for some reason hasn’t bothered to find it. “The order to restrict contraceptives,” wrote The Nation’s Steven Hsieh, “reportedly came from Ascension Health, a non-profit Catholic health services company that acquired St. John Health System in 2013… Sheila Reynerston, Advocacy Coor…
Read More…h are available, and the response was very clear,” Oder said. “There is no sign of a personal involvement of the Holy Father in this matter.” Supporters of John Paul’s fast-track canonization, like The Vatican Diaries author John Thavis, argue that the sex abuse scandal shouldn’t define the pope’s legacy. “One of the questions here is whether a pope can be a saint and also make managerial mistakes, and I think Vatican officials would say yes,” he…
Read More…arate check’ for abortion, which pro-life dissenters might try refusing to sign, is apparently false,” which the bishops have known since 2012. The irony is that while the Bracys’ suit is generally hostile to the ACA and the individual mandate, they will only have to pay $2.63 a month for health insurance for a family of six because of federal subsidies. And while the suit implies they will have to make a separate payment for abortion, it admits t…
Read More…rishing other relationships, working to mend our broken world, and being a sign of faithfulness to their community.” I hate to admit to agreeing with Douthat, but he’s right. The church can’t retreat from its fight on gay marriage because to do so would take it back nearly 50 years to when it was on the brink of approving the use of contraception but backed down because it would codify the idea, which it had already tacitly accepted, that the purp…
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Read More…ts with Baptism, and the Lord’s Supper, for that they have not any visible sign or ceremony ordained of God (872, XXV). This is no mere theological quibbling. The cornerstone of Reformation theology developed by Martin Luther, then adapted by John Calvin on its way to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, was the idea that human beings could not ourselves determine what God had marked as sure indicators of God’s grace in us. Rather, Luther argued th…
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