Religion Dispatches
I went to a memorial service Wednesday for Bob Edgar, the president of Common Cause, who died suddenly last month. (See Peter Laarman’s RD piece on Edgar’s legacy here.) The service was packed with social justice activists as well as current and former members of Congress. Edgar, a liberal Democrat, had been elected to six terms in the House of Representatives from a staunchly Republican congressional district because he had such a strong reputat…
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…ite diverse public high school here in Atlanta. Both went to baccalaureate services and graduation exercises. At none of these four events was any kind of religious expression attempted, not even at the baccalaureate services held at local churches. I was also struck by the lack of any kind of patriotic or ethical exhortation. The graduation events were primarily memorable for their extraordinary speed. Lacking anything much to say, school leaders…
Read More…t previously available to researchers” to track churches’ participation in service ministries and political action. His conclusions are intriguing: more churches are focusing on ministry, fewer on politics. Specifically and against the grain of the received narrative, conservative evangelicals are leading this shift: Fulton found that the most substantial decrease in political participation has occurred among white evangelical churches. For exampl…
Read MoreThe United Methodist News Service is reporting that over 600 clergy and lay members of the denomination are seeking church discipline against Attorney General Jeff Sessions for his role in the Trump administration’s policy of separating detained migrant families at the U.S. border: The group claimed in a June 18 statement that Sessions, a member of a Mobile, Alabama, church, violated Paragraph 2702.3 of the denomination’s Book of Discipline. Spec…
Read More…the conference. Religious conservatives in the US and abroad have labeled American efforts to promote LGBT human rights overseas as imperialism. But activists at a conference coinciding with the third anniversary of a memorandum from President Obama charging US foreign policy agencies to promote LGBT rights said that US efforts have been important to activists promoting equality and facing persecution around the world. Read the Washington Blade’s…
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…rm. That experience stayed with him. When he began the Clergy Consultation Service in 1967—the group of 21 New York clergy who referred women for abortions when it was still illegal in every state—he arranged for the clergy involved to attend a demonstration that could teach them what an abortion procedure entailed and what a woman experiences in an abortion. The clergy met with a pathologist who explained the procedure using a life-size model of…
Read More…hef to rotate the food storage. Mitt is so Mormon he’ll replace the Secret Service with the Danites. Mitt is so Mormon his Secret Service codename will be Mahonri Moriancumr. Mitt is so Mormon he thinks Harvard is the BYU of the east. Mitt is so Mormon he thought the debt ceiling was something that could only happen in a temple. Mitt is so Mormon, he doesn’t campaign: he “fellowships.” Mitt is so Mormon that he’s installing two basketball hoops at…
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…nizations that play a vital role in providing health care and other needed services either to violate their conscience or severely curtail those services.” They conveniently avoid discussing the fact that many Catholic institutions already voluntarily provide insurance coverage for contraception. Nonetheless, Republicans, with a handful of Democratic co-sponsors, have introduced the Respect for Rights of Conscience Act, which would amend the Affor…
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…ty by talking about the Christian roots of American freedom and connecting American destiny to the old belief, dating back to the 17th-century Puritans who settled New England, that America was God’s great “city upon a hill.” Reagan opposed abortion, promised to fight moral decay in American culture, and assured Falwell and the rising Religious Right that he would keep the federal government from intruding on the lives and schools of ordinary evan…
Read More…masquerading as a provider to entice unaware patients and capture federal funds that would otherwise go to full-service reproductive health providers. As Planned Parenthood President Dr. Leana Wen noted in a tweet, “Crisis pregnancy centers are not health centers. If the administration gets its way, Title X—our nation’s dedicated program for affordable birth control & reproductive healthcare—will be dismantled, leaving millions of people without a…
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