I am sometimes aghast at how much money I spent on my wedding dress. Four figures, more than I’d ever spent on any item of clothing before or since — enough, ten years on and one kid in, to cover one monthly mortgage payment, a family vacation to Cancun, six weeks of summer day camp, […]
Marriage is Now a Luxury Good Read More »
The battle of the sexes, waged this election season with fulsome fury in the public space, is being fought in a much more painful, private sphere as well. In churches (and synagogues and mosques) across the land, women are still treated as second-class citizens. And because women of faith are increasingly breadwinners, single moms and
Feminism’s final frontier? Religion. Read More »
Time wasted wisely. As fantasies go, this one is beyond innocent, involving neither a bemuscled UPS man nor an indulgent yoga boot camp with my best friend in Tulum. In it, husband and child are elsewhere but safe, returning home soon but not imminently. I have an hour alone in the apartment, with which to
Between them, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have as many children — 12 — as there were tribes of Israel. Ron Paul has five of his own, and in an early debate, perhaps unwilling to be outdone by Michele Bachmann’s fostering of dozens, Paul boasted that when he worked as a physician he delivered “4,000
Romney, Santorum and archaic ideas on fertility Read More »
Last week, the Christianity police, in the persons of Rick Santorum and Franklin Graham, came forward to discredit the president’s religious beliefs. First, Santorum called President Obama’s theology “phony”; then, on “Morning Joe,” Graham refused to accept Obama into his Christian band of brothers: “He has said he’s a Christian, so I just have to assume that he
The religion and politics of division Read More »
A very wise Trappist monk once told me that unless everyone gets to heaven, no one will. It’s this sense of mutual responsibility — fundamental to the Judeo-Christian tradition — that President Obama needs to emphasize now. It seems far-fetched, from my perspective, to think that God should have any opinion at all about contraceptive
How Obama should fight the ‘war on religion’ Read More »
The Obama administration may have wriggled out of a tight spot when it announced it would require insurers – and not some religiously based employers, as it previously indicated – to provide no-cost birth control to employees. But the furor hasn’t died down yet, and amid all the election-year politicking and claims of trampled religious freedoms, the revolutionary gains
The question occurred to me as I spent an hour browsing the Web, and on inspection, it seemed to me not entirely nutty. Technology is changing the way we think about all kinds of theological concepts, such as community, prayer, ritual and worship. Why should it not expand our definition of “soul”? What a soul
Rethinking the soul as the ’Net becomes more lifelike Read More »
Mitt Romney’s tax returns prompt this question. According to those documents, which he released recently, Romney gives at least 10 percent of his earnings of about $20 million a year to the Mormon Church. He tithes, in other words, in accordance with the expectations of his church’s leaders and the biblical command from Leviticus: “All tithes from
Is Romney nicer because he’s Mormon? Read More »
Haunting the political landscape is the ghost (or soul or spirit or memory or image, depending on how you see these things) of Gabriel Michael Santorum. Born at 19 gestational weeks, too young to live outside the uterus, Gabriel died within two hours. The story is well known. In October 1996, Karen Santorum underwent surgery
For Santorums, personal tragedy turned political Read More »