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The Man in the Red Dress: My Unlikely Friendship with Cardinal Francis George

…ul II’s successor, in which he would vote for the first time. When the 767 airliner jostled and dipped like a possessed carnival ride, Chicago’s cardinal didn’t budge—nary a flutter of newsprint. In fact, he seemed blissfully unaware of any tumult, real or imagined. That is a man secure in his mortality, I thought as I craned my neck to look for the flight attendant refilling wine glasses. I recalled that unflinching newspaper when I learned Cardi…

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With the Pope at Ground Zero

…ester NY, who lost his daughter Jean, a flight attendant on board American Airlines Flight 11. Mr. Roger said he hoped the pope would say prayers for the place, for the people, and for his daughter Jean. Praying at a unlighted candle next to the prie-dieu Pope Benedict XVI used on his visit, the Pope offered those prayers silently while looking at the south pool of the memorial. The 9/11 site has become not just a memorial or a museum—it is a pilg…

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Why Cliven Bundy Wasn’t A Religious Right Hero

…cation of his religious worldview served to insulate him from conservative flight. Bump writes that Robertson’s “comments about black Americans were buried under a rush to defend the right of Christian Americans to express disapproval of gays,” and that, compared to Bundy Robertson “did a much better job leveraging political sentiment in his favor after his controversial remarks.” But Robertson didn’t have to do much leveraging; his comments came…

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Trump Doesn’t Need to “Pivot” if Evangelicals Do it For Him

…ht stalwart Gary Bauer warmed up the audience by comparing the election to Flight 93, a new standard even for the hyperbolic rhetoric of evangelical supporters of Trump, who previously have called his rhetoric “Churchillian” and warned that this election could be the final nail in the coffin of American liberty. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a Flight 93 election. This may be our last shot. It’s time to roll. It’s time to run down the aisle and sav…

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The Pope’s Gay Priests

…this pope. Just how much dancing is required became apparent after the in-flight chat with journalists and Francis’ now-famous statement: “if a person is gay and seeks the Lord and has goodwill, well who am I to judge them?”  When it comes to making trouble in the dioceses, Francis is practicing what he preaches. Many bishops in this country went into containment mode, issuing statements to their local churches about what the pope had said and es…

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RDBook: Apocalypse Without God

…New Life Church’s World Prayer Center once… …I would like to do that. It’s cheap and they have hotel rooms—prayer closets, they call them. Or take the Crystal Cathedral. Right. Philip Johnson, who was a leading postmodern architect, designed the Crystal Cathedral. So what’s going on? As these systems become more complex, they become more volatile. As they become more volatile, you have to figure out how, in the economic realm, to manage risk. You…

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London Calling: “Our Great War Is a Spiritual War”

…their psyches as inaccessible markers of meaning and status, than they are tickets to a Premier League match. A Spiritual War? This, at least, is the gist of much of the heated banter on the uprisings on the Facebook fan page of trip hop duo Massive Attack, where one fan drew something of a spiritual assessment from the film Fight Club: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the m…

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Waiting for Lightning to Strike: A Wobbly Agnostic among the Atheists

…applaud this news, a murmur through the convention hall, Blackberries and iPhones tweeting on all sides of me.  “When you come out of the closet, shut the door behind you because you won’t need it anymore,” he continues. (Who’s he talking to? He’s preaching to the choir, isn’t he? As far as he knows?) “If you don’t have a deity,” he says, “you are an atheist.” I’m an English teacher and I agree this may indeed define an atheist—someone without a g…

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The Sacred and the Dead: The Trouble with Sugar Magnolia

…omething-year-old Deadhead guys hit on my teenage friends by offering them tickets to shows. Deadheads were anathema to my chosen subculture of socially conscious punks. East Bay punks were aggro and in your face about social justice, feminism, human rights; Deadheads, in our eyes, were too stoned and obsessed with their god Jerry to care. Sometimes, I’d be out in Berkeley at night, coming out of a punk show in some basement or garage, and I’d hea…

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Wichita, the Sequel: A Clinic Reopens at Ground Zero in America’s Fight over Abortion

…abortion clinics, particularly Dr. Tiller’s, and were arrested in massive numbers. One local activist told me that nearly 25 anti-abortion groups had been birthed during the Summer of Mercy, some of which are still active. The protests so shaped the city that, 22 years later, both sides recall the fight vividly. Faced with what was initially meant to be a week of protests, Wichita officials requested that the clinic close, and Dr. Tiller complied…

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