Vatican’s use of term ‘radical feminist’ says more about cardinals than nuns...
It surprises me a little that the men who run things at the Vatican did not use their most favorite recent pejorative – “feminist” — when they rapped the knuckles of Margaret Farley, a nun who has long...
View ArticleWhy are evangelicals supporting immigration reform?
Americans believe there’s too much religion talk in the public sphere, and these days, it’s especially easy to be cynical. Scratch the surface of any passionately held faith-based position between...
View ArticleWith health-care battle not yet over, Obama must reach out to religious leaders
At the funeral of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in August 2009, Boston’s Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley pulled President Obama aside for a quiet word. It was a sign of things to come: the first failure of the...
View ArticleIn their interfaith marriage and divorce, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are...
Never mind what the tabloids say. Celebrities are not “just like us.” We don’t have our first date over sushi on a private jet, as Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are rumored to have done, and we don’t...
View ArticleCan Romney reconcile his wealth and his faith?
As the calls for Mitt Romney to release his tax returns grow louder, and concerns about his undisclosed millions in offshore accounts increase, I wonder how the presumptive Republican nominee...
View ArticleEven if they don’t follow its rules, Catholics stick with their church
American Catholics are famously indifferent to the directives of their leaders. They don’t follow the rule book on much of anything: birth control, legal abortion, premarital sex, divorce. They wish,...
View ArticleRoman Catholic leaders need to get rid of their groupthink
Recent events prompt a stating of the obvious. The Roman Catholic Church is not now, nor has it ever been, a democracy. It values neither free speech nor freedom of the press. Its leaders are not...
View ArticleHow will Pope Francis ‘avoid breaking under the strain’?
“In the Curia, I would die.” Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires said this eight years ago, after the last conclave reportedly made him a runner-up to Benedict. Now he is Pope Francis — not...
View ArticleMany Unitarians would prefer that their polyamory activists keep quiet
The joke about Unitarians is that they’re where you go when you don’t know where to go. Theirs is the religion of last resort for the intermarried, the ambivalent, the folks who want a faith community...
View ArticleThe faithful’s doubt is our saving grace
I met a man last week who hoped to study grace. A funeral director from Tennessee, he knew grace when he saw it, in the quiet grief of a mother who lost a baby at birth or in a family that, confronted...
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