Religion Dispatches
Just after the new pope effectively shut the door to the ordination of women, a priest connects his segregated Louisiana upbringing and campaign to end the U.S. Army School of the Americas to last year’s excommunication for his refusal to quit ordaining women.
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Pope Francis turned heads with statements that suggest a course correction in the church’s attitude toward gays and women, but ultimately it’ll be what ministry, decision-making power, and moral authority women share that will answer the question.
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Why on earth is an orthodox Jew pushing a turbaned Muslim man in a wheelchair on the cover of Charlie Hebdo, the French baby-boomers’ favorite satirical magazine? Don’t bother looking for any deep symbolism—you won’t find it.
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A pair of historians discuss Republican rep. Todd Akin’s remarks on “legitimate rape”: the female body carries a huge burden of representation: her ability to protect the boundaries of her body, and to maintain her purity, reflects the church’s ability to do the same.
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In short: for “hooliganism.”
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The decision of Episcopal churches like St. Luke’s to convert en masse to Roman Catholicism while retaining a quasi-medieval Anglican liturgy is not, however, a decision to move into this ever-emerging ecclesial reality. It is a solemn retreat into an imagined past where a priest’s sacramental office itself, his back turned to the congregation, protects him from the conflicted desires and diverse stirrings of the wider church.
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Macho, blind, dishonest, kidnapped by aliens. In recent years, detractors have spat plenty of venomous words at Beatriz Paredes, former national director of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).
“I abort you, Beatriz,” one editor even wrote in his takedown.
A known feminist, Paredes stood by while her PRI colleagues in various states approved constitutional reforms declaring life as the moment of conception and penalizing the practice of abortion, leading to more investigations and arrests of women. While abortion was illegal before, it was practiced clandestinely without prosecutions in most places. Since 2008, 19 states have passed similar measures—most recently in Baja and San Luis Potosi just last month.
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Mormon moms organize to beat back controversial bill.
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For three months, the city of Windsor, Ontario was abuzz with the story of a Virgin Mary statue that wept tears of oil. Ensconced in a small shrine built on Fadia Ibrahim’s front lawn, the statue attracted hundreds of pilgrims, though it caused havoc for neighbors, city officials, and…
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Structured around a family (mother, father, three children) which suffers a terrible loss, The Tree of Life is an extended midrash, or commentary, on the Book of Job, a verse of which forms the epigraph to the film and which is sermonized upon during an extended scene at a church. At once essentially Catholic and doggedly scientific in its worldview, its central family becomes an archetype, undergoing processes of childlike wonderment, Oedipal lust and rage, the loss of innocence, the loss of faith, and finally, it seems, redemption.
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