What Does it Mean to Call “God” a White Racist?
American Christians must take on the difficult work of understanding how whiteness has been woven like a cancer into their Christianity.
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Note to the New Pope: Half of the World’s Poor are Women
Let’s be clear: half of the world’s poor are women, and the church’s effort to deprive the Catholic women among them of contraceptives, of the use of condoms that could protect them from HIV-AIDS, and of the ministry of women priests who would marry, absolve, and anoint them, is no service to them.
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Benedict’s Painful Legacy
Critics cite the “devastating” impact of Benedict’s papacy when it comes to the place of LGBT people within the Church, as well as his antagonism toward women religious.
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Where are the Clergy? A Report from Occupy DC
Many liberal religious activists, Rev. Merritt said, remain stuck in the 1960s in how they frame and address economic issues, yet have abandoned protest strategies in favor of the model of maintaining a Washington office whose purpose is to lobby members of Congress. Other religious activists are too focused on “events-oriented things” like staged arrests, “where they’ve pre-negotiated the thing, which is not to me civil disobedience.”
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Obama at Romero’s Tomb: The Politics of Liberation
Today, on the eve of the 31st anniversary of Oscar Romero’s assassination, President Barack Obama visited the Archbishop’s tomb. Romero was of one of the most beloved, misunderstood, and critiqued figures in the modern Latin American Catholic Church, and Obama’s visit has sparked some surprise and controversy—especially given Romero’s public critiques of the US government in the final years of his life and his association with Latin American liberation theology.
Read MoreControversial “Bishop of the Poor” Dies at 86
His advocacy for the indigenous made him a controversial figure among the wealthy Mexican landowners and led to strained relations with the Vatican.
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Glenn Beck’s Salvation Army
One of the strange aspects of broadcaster Glenn Beck’s recent moves to transform himself into a religious leader as well as entertainer and “educator” has been his intense attacks on President Obama’s theology of salvation, which he has called “evil” and “satanic.”
Read MoreHope for an End to Mexico’s Narco-Violence: Response to Jennifer Scheper Hughes
Reasons for cautious optimism.
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Narco-Violence and the Failure of the Church in Mexico
The mood in Cuernavaca was subdued this week after four decapitated bodies were discovered, hung from their feet from an overpass in yet another set of drug-related assassinations. Turf-battles between rival drug cartels have plagued the once-tranquil “city of eternal spring” since…
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Glenn Beck’s Cheap Grace
In his latest attack on the Social Justice, Glenn Beck slams the work of James H. Cone and Black Liberation Theology. On the surface, what Beck says may be appealing; Cone does make people uncomfortable. With a black man in the White House and talk of a “post-racial” America, who…
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