Religion Dispatches
…is toast. Whether he resigns or not, his Papacy legacy is in tatters historically, unless he can pull off an amazing change of heart, and language. At 83 years of age, that is hard to do. At the very least he should certainly heed the calls for an emergency synod to deal with the scope of the scandal. For all of his “doctrinal purity,” he very well may be in charge of the destruction of the moral and temporal authority of the Roman Catholic Churc…
Read More
…mainstreamed they’re comfortable announcing them on the plenary stage. “America is a gynocracy”—male supremacy Declaring that “America today is a gynocracy,” Azerrad claims that it’s ruled, along with the rest of the West, by a “feminine spirit which is at war with almost all traditional expressions of masculinity.” Furthermore, “what the regime hates is masculine men, who refuse to bend the knee; men who are courageous enough to say out loud what…
Read More
…doctrinal statements from Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists and a good number of other traditions, but individuals may not feel those are binding, or they may feel their circumstances are exceptional,” he said. The Catholic Church hasn’t shifted its policies regarding end-of-life care, said Dierdre McQuade, and she explained that the difference between palliative sedation and physician-assisted death is intent. Even in the case of increasing m…
Read More…n backed up by the likes of the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the National Association of Social Workers, “who all confirm that LGBT parents make good parents,” Freedom to Marry reiterated. No study is ever perfect, and Gartrell acknowledges limitations in her study, including the fact that the families who participated are a nonrandom sample. Such limitations were understandable in the 1980s when the…
Read More…anasia), vocations and ongoing formation (shoring up the rapidly declining number of priests and nuns) and, of course, religious freedom (Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who arranged Kim Davis’ meeting with Pope Francis, received two standing ovations from the bishops.). Then the debate turned to the USCCB’s quadrennial “Faithful Citizenship” voting guide. The bishops had voted earlier to revise the 2007 edition prepared for the 2008 election, whic…
Read More
…ge how they understand their own identity. If academic achievement and the number or type of initials after your name is the most important thing in the world to you, then it will change how you view your own masculinity and femininity. Similarly, if having children matters most to you, then you can only be truly “manly” or “feminine” if you have kids. Is there anything you had to leave out? Historians always want to include every interesting anec…
Read More…ose marriage equality on religious grounds. For them, I point to a growing number of religious leaders who also understand that gays and lesbians can do a lot to “redefine” marriage in beneficial ways. Rev. Ed Bacon, who leads the 4,000 member All Saints Church in Pasadena, Calif., told Oprah Winfrey this past weekend that marriage would be “enriched” by same-sex couples. I’ve never had a straight couple come to me and say, ‘My marriage is in trou…
Read More
…rospect of Barack Obama as the first president of the United States with African American ancestry is a thrilling possibility for so many, yet also cannot be disassociated from America’s shameful slaveholding past and the ghosts of so many Africans who died so that slavery might live, and African Americans brutally killed as a result of prejudice, hatred, and injustice. In our enlightened, scientific age, we don’t believe in the existence of ghost…
Read More
…me for the global dissemination of yoga, since it witnessed the British-American counterculture and the lifting of immigration restrictions to much of Western Europe and the United States, resulting in an influx of Indian gurus ready and eager to deliver yoga to a counterculture grasping for something radically opposed to what they perceived as the puritanical, body-negating Protestantism of their upbringing. Iyengar was a part of a much larger m…
Read More
…aw. Religious exemptions from abortion bans offer relief to only a limited number of individuals and can never be a comprehensive legal solution to the country’s reproductive health crisis. Nor should the right to control one’s body depend on proof of one’s religious commitments; reproductive freedom is a right that depends on one’s humanity, not one’s religious beliefs. That said, attacking the status quo incrementally proved to be a winning stra…
Read More