It’s impossible for some of us to understand why and how former senator Rick Santorum, who has zero qualifications to be president of the United States and whose positions on family and social issues are prehistoric, continues to survive and even thrive this Republican primary season. His victories in Alabama and Mississippi this week only further our astonishment. This is not purely the […]
Rick Santorum’s religious time machine 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 heads of households, that diminished
Feminism’s final frontier? Religion. Read More
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 babies.” There’s nothing wrong with
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 is.” With rhetoric like this,
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 technology, let alone about which
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 that contraception gives women have
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 comprises has been a matter
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 the land, whether the seed
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 to try to fix a
For Santorums, personal tragedy turned political Read More
The video, three minutes long and posted just a week ago, is tearing up the Internet, causing appreciative reactions among heterosexual men and some yoga fans and disapproval among yoga purists. Shot in the penthouse of the Mondrian SoHo hotel in New York, it shows a gorgeous young woman performing expert yoga moves wearing only a black lace bra and panties.