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Conservative Hardliners at Synod Prompt Question: “What Are We Doing Here?”

By Patricia Miller

…m the first small group discussions held this week indicate that a sizable number of bishops believe that the preparatory document is all doom-and-gloom and doesn’t do enough to celebrate the sizable number of Catholics who are successfully leading a traditional Catholic family life, reports John Allen: The synod’s final report ‘should begin with hope rather than failures, because a great many people already do successfully live the Gospel’s good…

Latina in America: What CNN Got Wrong

By Michelle Gonzalez Maldonado

…sh. This mirrors the documentary as a whole, which depicts Latino/as in America but not of America. The Catholic Church is the quintessential example of this marginalization, where Latino/as are essential to the survival of the Catholic Church in the United States but not in any way contributing to Catholicism. There was nothing positive about Latino/as contribution to the ecclesial life of Catholicism. If I didn’t know better, as a Latina Catholi…

The Religious Case Against Religious Discrimination in Cakeshop Case

By Patrick Hornbeck

…le reject LGBT equality is false and, frankly, insulting to millions of Americans of faith.” A third brief authored by religious civil rights advocates, including a number of Muslim organizations, expresses concern that a decision in Phillips’s favor might particularly jeopardize the rights of religious minorities, who would likely be disproportionately affected by what would amount to legalized discrimination. These authors cite Department of Jus…

The Gospel of Contradiction: An Interview with Mary Gordon

By Nathan Schneider

…mmunity that I can lead them to more familiarity with a very great text. A number of times you bring up Thomas Jefferson’s abridgement of the Gospels. He seems to be someone who, in some ways, you’re identifying with but also making very different choices from. I don’t have the luxury of just snipping out the parts of the Bible I don’t like. Whereas I greatly admire Jefferson and the Enlightenment figures for their courage in blasting through so m…

A Secret History of Satan

By W. Scott Poole

…n, in some cases public policy. The book makes the case that a significant number of Americans believe in the same Devil believed in by Puritan preachers and 19th-century evangelists. This cannot be dismissed. Its essential to understand why this is so, what historical conditions gave rise to this phenomenon and what does it tell us about the United States. Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing? I had several groups in mind, all of…

Will the Pope’s Woman Problem Alienate Young Catholics?

By Patricia Miller

…e Francis’ relationship to women in the Catholic Church. Writing in the American Prospect, Adele Stan argued that if Francis wants to maintain the church’s relevancy in the developing world he would promote positions that empower women, like lifting the ban on contraception. Yet, she says, “the Church remains intransigent on virtually any vestige of equality for women”: An institution that bars women from leadership conveys the message that women…

Debunking the Myth That Democracy Is “Incompatible” With Islam

By Asma Afsaruddin

…g no disjunction between religious beliefs and democratic principles. In a number of Muslim-majority countries, the preference was even stronger. In Jordan, for example, 54% of men and 55% of women want Sharia to be the only source of legislation. Interestingly, from a comparative perspective, a 2006 Gallup poll indicated that 46% of Americans say that they want the Bible to be a source of legislation. These findings corroborate earlier studies co…

‘Heretics’ or ‘Atheists’? A Response

By Rachel Ozanne

…when this friend was the teaching assistant for a class on 20th-century American history, the professor emphasized women’s rights and feminism throughout the course. At the end of the semester, the professor asked the students how many of them believed in equal rights for women. Almost the entire class raised their hands. However, when he asked them how many of them were feminists, a much smaller number raised their hands. The professor and my fri…

Review: Is the Religious Right Dying?

By Laura R. Olson

…liberal faith-based advocacy. To varying degrees, mainline Protestants, African-American Protestants, Catholics, and Jews joined together in the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement, the fair housing movement, the nuclear freeze movement, and various other demands for peace and justice. In this era, conservative people of faith largely lacked a unified political voice, in part by choice; evangelical Protestants for decades embrace…

The Role of Faith in the Lives of Abortion Providers

By Sarah Posner

…ey and Jan Schakowsky. The doctor said she is worried about the increasing number of restrictions on abortion states are implementing. (To get a sense how women’s access to abortion is shrinking across the country, take a look at this map assembled by the Guttmacher Institute.) Twenty-four hour waiting periods, for example, can cause a woman to miss the one day a week a clinic performs abortions, pushing the procedure off another week and making i…