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Church Synod Recap: Micromanaging the Morals of Others

By Mary E. Hunt

…glare as similar meetings do except that Pope Francis spells change in the air. Many members of the media cannot resist his charms and seem desperately to want to report on a BIG religion story. One major paper jumped on the interim report that contained some useful language, though by no means the “earthquake” or “revolutionary” theology that some commentators proclaimed, reporting “At the Vatican, a Shift in Tone Toward Gays and Divorce”. A week…

Can Religion Professors Save the Planet?

By Ivan Strenski

…excess of 9,000 attendees, require significant national and international air travel, nearly a week’s stay in hotels—not known for their commitment to a “green” environmental ethic—as well as increasingly cavernous convention centers, similarly unknown for their dedication to energy conservation, locavore provisioning or sustainability. More than that, we learn that Zoloth was responsible for pressing program chairs at this year’s annual meeting…

American Nuns and the Vatican: More Pain than Promise

By Mary E. Hunt

…ce of the press event. There wasn’t much news that could be shared without airing differing views, something this group avoided like sin. Let’s be frank: differences started the whole Visitation ball rolling in the first place, but the very process precluded discussing them openly among equals. The women’s statements illuminated another problematic dimension of the whole sorry affair, namely, the ways some women are, and allow themselves to be, us…

Why Was Suspicion Over “The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven” Ignored for Years?

By Rachel Wagner

…x’s account of five hunky, winged angels carrying Kevin gently through the air before setting him down in a ditch. The book is filled with the stuff of heavenly dreams, and surely offers comfort to many who look for assurance of the afterlife in the face of trauma. It’s no wonder the book has sold so many copies. Of course, Alex and Kevin’s book isn’t the only example of heavenly travel marketed to a hungry Christian audience. There’s even a recog…

Pope Francis, Breeding Bunnies and Ideological Colonization

By Patricia Miller

…ld as “contraceptive imperialism.” During the run-up to the historic 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development, which John Paul bitterly objected to for its emphasis on reproductive health care, all the Catholic cardinals met at the Vatican to denounce the conference as “cultural imperialism”: Neither the Cairo conference nor any other forum should lend itself to cultural imperialism or to ideologies that isolate the human person in a se…

Muslim Women Create a Mosque of Their Own in Los Angeles

By Brie Loskota

…she sat in the women’s section of a local mosque listening to a talk. The air in the mosque was cold so she took her scarf from her head and wrapped it around her shoulders. “This woman came by and grabbed me by the shoulders,” Maznavi said. “She shook me and yelled at me [to cover my hair]. She wouldn’t stop and I asked her if she wanted me to leave. She said, ‘yes.’” And so, Maznavi told me: “I got kicked out of the last mosque where I felt saf…

Michael Sean Winters is Right: Pope Francis Should Not Address Congress

By Patricia Miller

…s, made most of his historic addresses in the United States at large, open-air masses and similar venues where his comments where clearly situated within the appropriate religious context. But no religious leader has ever addressed a joint meeting of Congress. According to the official history of the House of Representatives, only foreign heads of state have addressed joint meetings of Congress, with the exception of Lech Walesa in 1989, who, as h…

The Sacred and the Dead: ‘Ripple’ Is a Spiritual Manifesto

By Jim Burklo

…ia A microsecond before Jerry hit the riff, we the audience leapt into the air, thrown to the sky by a fountain not made by the hands of men. We spun around to look in the wides of each other’s eyes, mouths agape with awe, hair tossed wild, overwhelmed by the unmistakable, ineffable reality of Something Larger—an emergent property not reducible to the band, the crowd, or anything mortal. “Ripple,” penned by the band’s chief lyricist and official f…

Anglican Bishops Punish Episcopal Church Over LGBT Inclusion; Secularization’s Role in Moving Latin America ‘Beyond Machismo’; Greek Orthodox Bishop Says Gays Deserve Respect; Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…gn focused on the ideals of unity and tolerance. “We need to breathe clean air, without racism, without xenophobia and discrimination, we need a diverse society that includes all groups without exception”, she argued in her candidature. The 39-year-old Muslim who was elected councilor on June 13, 2015 touched on the importance of having an open-mind and debunking myths. “If you do not know your neighbor, you believe all the rumors and stereotypes…

Could a Real Life Jurassic Park Help with Climate Change?

By Michael Schulson

…y frozen, instead of releasing its enormous stores of trapped CO2 into the air. It’s possible, writes Shapiro, that mammoths would “actually slow the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere, and therefore the rate of global warming.” The considerations go beyond cost-benefit analysis, though, and to questions of culpability and obligation. As is the case with many large, extinct animals, human hunters probably played a role in t…