Religion Dispatches
…tter than does Mayor Bloomberg or the NYPD). The AP continues to release information which undermines and refutes the city’s changing defenses of its tactics, while mayors like Rahm Emanuel and Corey Booker distance themselves from Mayor Bloomberg’s police force’s tactics (More on Chicago.) Yesterday, I spoke with Dr. Sebastian Gorka from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and Law Professor Sahar Aziz of Texas Wesleyan on Al Jazeera’s T…
Read MoreSmall update below. Via the website Catholic Culture, Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George frets that Catholic hospitals will be forced to close down rather than comply with the contraceptive coverage requirement. In the process, Cardinal George, who has previously compared gay rights parades to the Ku Klux Klan, issues a parade of doozies, including a warning that the church is being “despoiled of her institutions.” George later apologized for th…
Read More…tant Christian, and was a member of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, while Romney is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Despite Protestants’ broad religious connection to Obama, they support Romney over Obama by a five-point margin in the April 19-23 tracking aggregate.” It’s silly for Gallup on the one hand to declare that “very religious” Protestants are the “functional equivalent” of evangelicals (which…
Read More…I enjoyed them,” Ryan says. “They spurred an interest in economics, in the Chicago School and Milton Friedman,” a subject he eventually studied as an undergraduate at Miami University in Ohio. “But it’s a big stretch to suggest that a person is therefore an Objectivist.” “I reject her philosophy,” Ryan says firmly. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody…
Read More…cipline that call homosexuality “incompatible with Christian teaching” and sanctions only heterosexual marriage. New wording would have removed those passages. The vote came after a debate that became contentious when one African delegate compared homosexuality to bestiality and declared that God would not create humans as gay or lesbian. During the vote, supporters of the petition to change the Book of Discipline stood at the edges of the convent…
Read More…r I’ll be as president. In 2004, Obama told a public television station in Chicago, “What I believe is that is between a man and a woman. What I believe, in my faith, is that a man and a woman, when they get married, are performing something before God, and it’s not simply the two persons who are meeting.” In 2010, he told progressive bloggers, “I have been to this point unwilling to sign on to same-sex marriage primarily because of my understandi…
Read More
…ir aimed for the heart, but hit the nation in its stomach with his tale of Chicago meatpacking in The Jungle (1906). Michael Harrington showed that the affluence of the 1950s wasn’t for everyone in The Other America (1962). Decades later, William Julius Willson’s two books—The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) and When Work Disappears (1996)—showed what happened to communities when joblessness became the norm. Barbara Ehrenreich trekked from Florida to M…
Read More…s Most Rev. George Rassas. In 2008, Cardinal Francis George, Archbishop of Chicago, said in a deposition that Rassas had “withheld information about abuse allegations.” These are two of the people who will be seeing whether Girl Scouts USA meets the appropriate standards for a Catholic organizational partner. In light of this, why not ask whether the Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life, and Youth meet Girl Scouts USA’s standards, rather than…
Read More
…. A Vatican-, or in this case, USCCB-launched investigation is what Sister Sandra Schneiders, IHM, calls the equivalent of a grand jury investigation. There is the presumption that something is wrong, not something right, that there is guilt to be uncovered, not virtue to be unleashed. What is wrong seems to be women and girls thinking for themselves and acting for the common good. What boggles the mind is why the Roman Catholic Church would be so…
Read More
…bleachers, and eight speakers lined up to address the crowd. The audience numbered about 30. Even Timothy Dolan at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, on the kickoff day of the Fortnight, only gathered 250 people. The nuns got that many in small towns across the country at stop after stop. The bus trip also proved that there is a deep hunger across generations for this kind of faith-based organizing. The crowd in DC was surprisingly younger…
Read More