Commentary on Caitlyn Jenner Reveals Fundamentalism’s Abusive Dynamic
If the dignity of the individual person means anything, then it has to mean this.
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Church’s Lawyers Have SNAP in Their Sights
While the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has denied that there is a national strategy for the Church to fight sex abuse cases more aggressively, even the Church’s staunchest defenders see the pattern. As William Donohue, the pugilistic president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, told the New York Times this week, bishops are going after SNAP because “SNAP is a menace to the Catholic Church.”
Too Late for Apologies: Three Steps the U.S. Bishops Should Take to Prevent Another Sexual Abuse Scandal
This week’s U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops summer meeting in Seattle will be dominated by the ongoing sexual abuse scandal. At this point apologies aren’t sufficient—it’s time for action.
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Toward a Literature of Abuse
Both in the first wave of press in 2002 about abuse in the Catholic Church and now during this second wave, we’ve talked very little about girls, and even less about stalking and the other kinds of abuse that people in power, in particular religious authorities, enact on the unsuspecting and the young. While we have a lot of journalists covering the scandal and talking to victims, we have very little in the way of “personal narrative” of what this experience is like. I hope my novel, This Gorgeous Game, and its protagonist’s first-person voice will offer a new perspective on the conversation.
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Father Does Not Know Best: How To Fix the Catholic Church
From an all-male hierarchy that trains priests to look only to their superiors for guidance, to a theological emphasis on secrecy, to the “creeping infallibility” that confers divine authority on church leaders, the Catholic church needs reform—at a structural level. And it’s up to the laity to begin the process.
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Taking It to the Streets: Anonymous vs. Scientology
A group named Anonymous has been using electronic sabotage and staging street demonstrations against Scientology in what may be a first—an unaffiliated, secular group protesting an entire religion.
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