Religion Dispatches
…ttle-discussed provision of the ACA, hospitals that serve disproportionate numbers of the urban poor are losing their subsidies. But for Obama not to stand his ground and say that the cheap, low-level policies that many healthy people now have should be cancelled for the sake of the common good: that’s just inexcusable. On the other hand, he’s not getting a lot of help from his Democratic “friends” on this one, and for the same reason: They likewi…
Read More…sources, having failed to turn to renewables while mindlessly pumping more cheap petroleum into our veins. Like other critics of the new encyclical, Brooks chalks up the pope’s hostility to capitalism as the product of naivete or perhaps of churchly antimodernism. What he fails to consider is that the Catholic Church, along with the wider Christian tradition going back to Jesus himself, have never been at ease with the wonderworking power of indiv…
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…farms down to Mexico, putting small farmers out of business. And while the number of undocumented border crossers is down, Brother David says, it will be virtually impossible to eliminate them as long as the opportunities for jobs exist. As we continue to search for people along the road, Millsap complains that no politician wants to acknowledge these deaths: “Most of the people dying down here aren’t criminals,” he said. “They’re coming here to w…
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…n hanging from when it was a clinic that provided abortions, stamping the word “closed” over the old clinic logo. The office’s entryway walls are hung with a number of other signs, like trophies from clinics Operation Rescue claims to have shut down. Far from being tired, Newman boasted, “I’m here to make people tired of abortion. It works great—they get tired of you, the pro-lifers, first. But we don’t go away, and once they settle into the fact…
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…of puns, serious and funny puns that took as cosmic teaching the clang of words and phrases with each other. And this, the rabbi taught me, was what my new Haggadah was already: a midrash on the ancient text that turned it in a new direction. What neither he nor I expected was that as I was reinterpreting the text, the text was reinterpreting me. Turning me in a new direction, making a new “I” that was a midrash on the old me. So I went ahead with…
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…w dozen yards of the riders and take pictures of the scene with their cell phone cameras. Traffic on College Avenue begins to pick up. “You’re protesting God!” a motorist hollers when he catches sight of one of the Soulforce banners. Finally a slender young man wearing a “CBC Soccer” jacket ventures all the way to the sidewalk. “I just kind of want to show them I care,” says Jonathan Jacobs, a junior at the college. Jacobs, whose family moved to C…
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…have often worked against the American separation of church and state. According to Christopher Kauffman’s book Faith and Fraternalism, lobbying from the Knights helped get the phrase “Under God” inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance and led to Columbus Day being recognized as a federal holiday. More recently, the Knights contributed over a million dollars to Proposition 8, which temporarily overturned marriage equality in California. They made…
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…es would talk to me and let me do interviews. There were times when I made phone calls to inmates’ family members to let then know that visiting times had changed, to save them a long trip to the prison. I also visited the families of inmates with pastors and other volunteers to bring food, sometimes a gift a child’s dad had made. I basically become part of the lives of the people whose lives I wanted to document. How did a project you undertook f…
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…e for Peace, on whose Rabbinical Council he serves. (Compared to J Street’s 800-plus-member Rabbinic Cabinet, JVP’s two-year-old Rabbinic Council has just 50.) Rosen told me he was not forced out, but that his decision to step down was driven by “stress between individual congregants and me,” and was made “for my congregation’s well-being and my own well-being.” Rosen described Israel’s 2009 war in Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, as the “breaking point…
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…er of the amazing things about him. He was approachable, answering his own phone and mail, meeting with complete nobodies like me. I thanked him for the basketball lessons that I had learned from him, but more importantly for the life lessons. His beloved wife Nellie had passed away in 1985 after 53 years of marriage, and my wife had died suddenly in 1992. Coach gave me a powerful model for dealing with that loss, a reminder that those we loved we…
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