Religion Dispatches
…g some moments in the spotlight and comparing political fortunes to catching “lightning in a bottle.” His campaign rides on convincing aspirational moderates and younger voters to hitch their wagons to his telegenic, pro-business, civil-union supporting star. Very Disney. Very Orlando. Trouble is that Republican conduct over the last two years provides very little evidence of GOP capacity for nimble redirection or self-redefinition….
Read More…havior of the church (and through it the larger society). That’s as much a business decision as it is a political calculation. Daly himself says that 90% of his budget is directed “marriage and family issues.” That, combined with a long-term shift in conservative Christian circles from a few highly partisan leaders to a broader leadership, means that Daly is going to find it increasingly easier to raise funds for his adoption initiative than for g…
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…humanity”: The pope is a Catholic; perhaps it’s in the nature of the news business to be freshly astonished by this fact every couple of months. It’s also true that the Vatican bureaucracy is arrogant, secretive, suspicious of outsiders, and given to the use of almost impenetrable jargon. Sometimes, as a journalist, you have to explain what they mean. But none of this explains, still less excuses, the claim that he had said gay marriage was a thr…
Read More…ook. Corsi doesn’t cite Titus, but Titus has been pushing this harebrained business for a few years. He first presented it to an IOTC “First Friday” event last year. In a 2009 story on WND, Titus was interviewed as an expert on the original meaning of the Constitution, where he also made the same arguments. In its announcement of the book release today, WND notes that before the release, “conscientious Americans” had “two choices:” believe that Ob…
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…he reason for that may prove to be what we in the endangered but dangerous business of education call: “a teachable moment.” There is, I suggested, a strong and unified religious culture dominating the Republican Party’s political positions, community identity, moral boundaries, and theological sensibilities. Yes, this culture includes evangelical Christians, but it also includes Mormons, Catholics, and even Jews whose economic and social prioriti…
Read More…boldly courageous posture. As a clergywoman whose work has been about the business of civil rights, peace and reconciliation, I cannot sit idly by and have joined my fellow clergy in their commitment. Now, I wonder, with our denomination losing members in large numbers daily, how we will fare as we begin to see the groundswell of clergy facing trial and having their orders defrocked for their commitment to justice? Of course, I know the Church th…
Read More…ilure of the NPR story to present an accurate picture of the religious and business motives of gay conversion programs, and Warren Throckmorton and Ted Cox have described the marginal, controversial practices of Wyler’s Journey into Manhood program. But to get the full story—the story NPR missed—it’s important to understand Wyler, Journey into Manhood, and gay conversion programs not as a health story but as part of a decades-long religious experi…
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…to build homes on the commons—a politics of vagrancy: students feed small business owners, who donate supplies in turn; anarchists insulate tents with reform-minded voters; and, vitally, homeless people and the tentatively housed, already residents of our plaza, form bonds of affinity and mutual aid with “middle-class” protesters. But simultaneously, differences in tactics, language, and aesthetics regularly cause people to wander back to their m…
Read More…in this alleged decline of “Christendom.” Abortion Don’t miss this instant classic from Sarah Morice-Brubaker, writing last June after Santorum said that exceptions to abortion bans to protect the health of the mother are “phony:” Now, I actually was there when the original plot was hatched, funnily enough: It was back in 1973, at the Women’s Exchange tea room in Eugene, Oregon. (To the public, it was billed as a Missionary Society presentation.)…
Read More…solid science, would have dropped that whole embarrassing “kingdom of God” business quicker than you can say “clear-thinking oasis.” Because whatever it was Jesus was going on about there, it could not possibly have been as compelling as the “kingdom of facts,” as Peter Gomes once described science. Poor first-century bloke. He couldn’t help it; he didn’t know anything worth knowing. He didn’t know any science. Bergevin believes it; Dawkins believ…
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