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Calling Dan Brown: Pope’s Resignation Connected to Network of Gay Bishops?

By Peter Montgomery

…UK) has written that the pope’s decision to resign came on the same day in December he received a dossier put together by cardinals assigned to look into the “Vatileaks” scandal. But the leak of internal documents may be far from the most interesting thing cardinals will be talking about as they prepare to choose a new pope: According to La Repubblica, the dossier comprising “two volumes of almost 300 pages—bound in red” had been consigned to a sa…

Good Friday and Purim: Non-Harmonic Convergences

By Naomi Seidman

…ar, the nothing as fountainhead of Buddhist and Jewish mysticism. Even the December dilemma is not without its opportunities to meditate on the power of light in the shared winter darkness, descending on all of us equally. This Friday, though, is not one of those occasions for happy resonances, or put otherwise, narcissistic affirmation. The vagaries of the Jewish lunar (lunatic?) calendar, in combination with the more familiar plod of the solar o…

Do Psychedelics Offer a Path To The “God Within”?

By Hollis Phelps

…cs and Religious Experiences William A. Richards Columbia University Press December 8, 2015 Psychologist William A. Richards wants to change that. Richards has spent the bulk of his career researching such substances—which, in line with an established literature, he prefers to call “entheogens”—and their therapeutic uses. Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experience is not only a summation of his work—one that effortlessly mixes the res…

French Theologian Urges Islam to Self-Critique, Fails to Notice Log in Own Eye

By Daniel J. Schultz

… Two weeks after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, French President François Hollande proclaimed a set of sweeping educational reform measures; he called them the “great mobilization of the schools to the [secular] values of the Republic.” These measures, reported by Le Monde and elaborated in detail by education minister Najat Vallaud Belkacem on January 22, were announced not primarily in response to the killings, but in response to a troubling set o…

8 Bill Maher Statements For UC Berkeley To Consider Before Commencement

By Nathan Lean

…vote by UC Berkeley students to drop Maher as the keynote speaker at their December commencement. Late yesterday, university officials decided to override that vote, arguing that his views were expressed through constitutionally protected speech and are “irrelevant in this context.” According to many of Maher’s supporters, those opposed to his appearance are foes of the first amendment. Buried in all of the noise surrounding this ruckus, however,…

Is the Growing Anti-Pope ‘Rad-Trad’ Community Poised to Become ‘Qatholics’? History Isn’t Encouraging

By Joshua P Hevert and Thomas Lecaque

…eived more Catholic support than expected; appearing via video feed at the December 12th 2020 “Let the Church Roar Prayer Rally,” a Jericho March-organized event; giving speeches on the “Great Reset” conspiracy in May 2021; giving an apocalyptic speech on “Man’s War with God” for a conference in Venice in July, 2021; a condemnation of Traditiones Custodes also in July; a video message for “No Fear Day,” an anti-Covid restriction event in Turin, en…

Jesus, Santa, and Now Sound of Music‘s Mother Abbess?

By Shannen Dee Williams

…ons in the Americas because of their race, these black women crossed the Atlantic Ocean to embrace the religious state. While the majority of these women were extremely-light skinned and could pass for white, at least three dark-skinned, U.S.-born black women of slave heritage entered European congregations in the nineteenth century. Fredericka Law of Savannah, Georgia, for example, received the habit of Missionary Franciscan Sisters of the Immacu…

Archbishops Try to Hold it Together, Order Re-Vote on Women Bishops

By Joanna Brooks

…space for minority perspectives and what emerges, really, is a concern for numbers. As one of the authors of the Times letter, Tom Sutcliffe, wrote elsewhere, “I absolutely do not want to see the Church of England ending up as a result of our in my view correct determination to include women in the ordained ministry at all levels with an even smaller footprint. I do not want the Church to vote to shrink more, and there is no doubt that the ordinat…

Oppose Afghanistan But Not a Pacifist? Tough.

By Gabriella Lettini

…der-in-Chief and as a peacemaker. New private “Pentagon papers” (disclosed December 29, 2009 on The Rachel Maddow Show by journalist Richard Engel) add to a growing body of evidence that Afghanistan is another quagmire like Vietnam. Even that previous war’s chief architect, Robert McNamara, belatedly and impotently admitted it was an ill-conceived mistake. It was, like Afghanistan, an endless, poorly planned, losing war begun by one president and…

Here’s What the Court Didn’t Decide in Masterpiece

By Patrick Hornbeck

…ine-drawing about the capacity of cakes (or flowers, or hairstyles, or any number of other products) to be expressive may have the consequence of drawing out more clearly the conflict at the heart of Masterpiece Cakeshop. As Justice Kennedy rightly noted, the case is about “the proper reconciliation” of, on the one hand, “the authority of a State… to protect the rights and dignity of gay persons” and, on the other, “the right of all persons to exe…