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 […]
The Faithful’s Doubt is Our Saving Grace Read More »
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 without too many rules.
Many Unitarians would prefer that their polyamory activists keep quiet Read More »
“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 just in the Curia,
How will Pope Francis ‘avoid breaking under the strain’? Read More »
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 elected officials, so they
Roman Catholic leaders need to get rid of their groupthink Read More »
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, by a wide margin, that their bishops were talking more
Even if they don’t follow its rules, Catholics stick with their church Read More »
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 reconciles his great, secret stores of wealth with the principles
Can Romney reconcile his wealth and his faith? Read More »
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 appear together
In their interfaith marriage and divorce, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are ‘just like us’ Read More »
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 president to understand the moral
With health-care battle not yet over, Obama must reach out to religious leaders Read More »
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 April and November of an election year, and find a
Why are evangelicals supporting immigration reform? Read More »
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 been a
Vatican’s use of term ‘radical feminist’ says more about cardinals than nuns they rebuke Read More »