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A Catholic Dilemma: Can They Root for Rudy?
Rudy Giuliani has a Catholic problem and it’s not, strangely enough, that he was raised as a Roman Catholic, considered becoming a priest, then dumped his second of three wives on television and has been photographed in a dress. Rudy’s Catholic problem is this: he is pro-choice, and 63 percent of white Catholics who go
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The Authenticity Test
Over the past three years, Sen. John Kerry has had a lot of time to think about his God, and at a meeting with journalists in Washington earlier this month he shared those thoughts. He grew up in a Roman Catholic home before Vatican II; though devout, he prayed in private behind his closed bedroom
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✴︎ Religion
Campaign Soul Searching
On Nov. 14, in the enormous ballroom of the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront hotel, hundreds of black-clad bishops were called to prayer-and then they got down to business. After a long debate, 221 of 224 members of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops approved the document, called “Faithful Citizenship.” The goal: to encourage American Catholics
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✴︎ Religion
Reverend Gomes’s “Scandalous Gospel”
In his new book “The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus” the Rev. Peter Gomes pushes Christians to see beyond what he says is the “domesticated” view of the Christian Lord and embrace instead the gospel message of radical good and radical justice. Gomes decries the slogan “What would Jesus do?” as superficial and self-justifying, preferring instead
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On ‘Perfecting’ the Jews
Imagine, if you will, a world in which the right-wing pundit Ann Coulter were not a grating opportunist who said horrible things on air for her own personal gain. Imagine
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Love Thy (Gay) Neighbor
He is the nicest right-wing evangelical powerhouse you’ve never heard of. Jim Daly grew up the last of five children in what anyone would call a broken home. His mother died when he was 10 and he lived with, in turn, a stepfather, a foster family, his own alcoholic father and his divorced brother. He
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Proof
Relations between science and religion have grown so strained that it’s hard to imagine they were ever otherwise. Until the Enlightenment, however, science and religion were better than friendly: they were the same thing. The “scientists” at the great medieval universities were students of theology. Mining divine Scripture for insights into human morality and free
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Beliefwatch: Heavenly
It isn’t every day that a Christian book–that is, a book written by a Christian author for a Christian audience and marketed by a Christian publisher–crosses over into the secular market and makes any kind of appearance on best-seller lists or gets noticed by the mainstream press. Rick Warren’s “The Purpose-Driven Life” had been on
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Beliefwatch: Slaughter
The ancient Jews did it. So did the Romans and the Aztecs. Sacrificing an animal to please or placate God or the gods has been commonplace for many thousands of years. Still, it’s a little bit shocking when we see the practice in our own backyards.
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Newsweek Cover Story: Mitt’s Mission
For Mitt Romney, it all started in a two-story, wood-framed house on a busy street in Pontiac, Mich. Painted beige, encircled by an asphalt lot that would hardly hold a dozen cars, the building manages to look both decrepit and picturesque, like a million other urban churches across the country. Today it houses the Unity