Religion Dispatches
…a special Mass held for Lozada on February 17 and attended by some five thousand people at De La Salle University, Lozada was flanked by Catholic bishops and priests on stage along with former president Corazon Aquino, all of whom expressed their praise for, and support of, Lozada and asked the congregation to pray for him. On February 18, Ateneo de Manila, my host university and a Jesuit institution, held a special “Truth and Accountability Mass”…
Read More
…d Regional Center in San Bernardino, CA. In the aftermath of the attack, a number of Republican presidential candidates and elected officials issued tweets that, many have argued ad nauseum, demonstrated a commitment to public piety instead of public policy as a response to the massacre. In a rare moment, news and social media outlets in the U.S. became a forum for a surprising debate about spiritual disciplines—the meaning and import of prayer. L…
Read More…aception. So is the salient difference the size of the list? Is there some number of things-this-paper-can-be-used-for that puts the employer at a safe moral distance from the act, where previously they had been complicit? If so, what’s the number? How long does the list of possible uses have to be to assuage the employer’s conscience enough to let the employees use their compensation for things the employer finds morally repugnant? See, here’s th…
Read More…. Single women who remained single were not unknown, but were not large in number and remained an anomaly. Wealthy and middle-class or educated single women could hold their own. In the diaspora, professional single women, outside of a traditional Muslim context, will inevitably change the face of the community. Traditional, conservative Muslims may have much to fear from these changes, but they must be faced. Growing numbers of Muslim women are m…
Read More
…conomic interests of the time. This engagement led the movement to raise a number of questions about its mission. For example, was the social gospel’s primary objective to cast a wide ideological net to create a broad coalition of secular and religious leaders, or was it to identify itself with specific economic and political policies? Common historical wisdom holds that the social gospel broke apart at the end of World War I, a victim of both a n…
Read More
…xplore the issues that divide their congregations and communities. After a number of clichés are deployed to describe the deep divisions in US culture—“Our society is getting meaner,” claims one—Colossian resolutely walks participants through various exercises to identify areas of conflict, and helps the pastors work through their differences, respectfully and with love. So far so good. It quickly becomes clear, however, that there’s a major obsta…
Read More…d the 2008 election; as I’ve argued before, he gained support across the a number of demographic groups, and it’s difficult to make the case that Obama won because he finally shed the Democrats’ (imagined) hostility to religion. If you’re a religious person whose faith compels you to favor government programs to support the less economically blessed among us, pulling the lever for McCain-Palin probably wasn’t in the cards. To add insult to injury…
Read More
…limited to procreation; that it was acceptable to limit family size for a number of reasons; and that it was licit to use the naturally occurring sterile period to do so. Enter Catholic physician John Rock. By designing a contraceptive that used hormones already present in a woman’s body to mimic the natural infertility of a pregnant woman, he hoped the Vatican would find a theological basis to approve the method. In 1958, when the Pill was alrea…
Read More
…ong). But I’m getting carried away. Luz del Mundo persists because, for thousands of people, it has an appeal. And to understand why, exactly, it helps to pay a visit to the Church’s Mexican Jerusalem, tucked into the eastern sprawl of Guadalajara. We have our own power There is no clear border to Hermosa Provincia. The colorful walls of Guadalajara’s citrus-lined streets just grade into whitewashed buildings, their window sashes and doors painted…
Read More…y .26. That should give you (digging for iTouch calculator) 4%. That’s the number of people who can be persuaded on religious grounds to preserve reproductive rights. Common ground on this subject does not work. The best you can hope for is to change the subject, and we all know how well that worked during the health care reform debate. (Conversely, .82x.26=.21, or nearly all of the Republican base.) Second: nobody gives a rat’s patootie about rel…
Read More