Not Another Iran
One storyline that’s making the rounds in the wake of ongoing protests in Egypt is that an applicable comparison can be made to Iran’s “green revolution” of 1979. Ayaan Hirsi Continue Reading →
Category: Timely
Separation of Church and Health Care
Francis X. Rocca of Religion News Service reports that the Vatican will write new guidelines for Catholic health care institutions in response to recent ideological clashes with the Catholic Health Association, notedly over the excommunication of a sister who approved an abortion to save the life of a woman and later the removal of Catholic standing for the hospital where she was treated.
Kevin Clarke at America Magazine (the national Catholic weekly) writes (rather rosily) that a series of communications and conference calls in January confirms that CHA and the USCCB are in agreement that the local bishop is the buck on ethical decisions at Catholic hospitals, but we suspect the clashes between the two organizations won’t so quickly be resolved. Continue Reading →
79: The Class of 2010 Women Religious
Jo Piazza: This was a bad week to be a small survey on women religious, what with prime news real estate being filled with Egyptian unrest, Hollywood rehab and a snowpocalypse of epic proportions blanketing the Midwest.
But a small survey on women religious was indeed released this week, on Groundhog Day (better known in some circles as Church’s World Day for Consecrated Life), by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Georgetown-based Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.
The survey gave a general overview of the women who professed their perpetual vows in religious life (became full-fledged sisters) in 2010 and was the first of its kind to evaluate a single year’s class of entering nuns. Of the 63% of orders who responded to the survey only 79 women took their final vows in the past year. Continue Reading →
The Dream of Full Unity: The Catholic Church Invites Anglicans to Come On Over
by Elissa Lerner
After so much fanfare surrounding the surprise election of Archbishop Timothy Dolan to the presidency of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) this past fall, or even the Pope’s recent blessing of Facebook, perhaps the greatest shock in the Catholic world is the near silence regarding the three bishops, seven priests, and three hundred members of six congregations that have become ordained and opted into new Ordinariates – subsections of the Catholic Church for disaffected Anglicans. These conversions, all occurring in England in the past few weeks, are directly in response to the Anglican Church’s move to ordain women priests.
Sound familiar?
That’s because a little more than a year ago, the Catholic Church specifically invited disaffected Anglicans to move, causing shockwaves at least through the Internet, if not the world. At the time, few could decipher what the invitation entailed. The October 20, 2009 move was generally thought to address the concerns of conservative Anglicans who oppose the increasing acceptance of the ordination of women and open homosexuals to the priesthood and episcopate. Both issues have caused splintering within the Anglican Communion and debates within the Catholic Church. Continue Reading →
Mubarak's Reality: Baksheesh
Hosni Mubarak didn’t contrive his I’m the preventer of chaos reality all alone. The tyrannical dictator of Egypt, who today told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour that he’d love to step down but can’t, has for three decades been appreciated (both politically and financially) by the West for what he is not: another critical voice in a troubled and troubling region. Poverty, ineptitude, graft, corruption, injustice: all were no match for Western fear of creeping radical Islam, i.e. the Muslim Brotherhood. Mubarak’s spent his years making the most of Islamophobic rhetoric. In a nation that’s neither rich nor poor, African nor Middle Eastern, friendly nor hostile, familiar nor understood, Mubarak’s benefitted from playing the foil for Western projection. Continue Reading →
Mubarak’s Reality: Baksheesh
Hosni Mubarak didn’t contrive his I’m the preventer of chaos reality all alone. The tyrannical dictator of Egypt, who today told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour that he’d love to step down but can’t, has for three decades been appreciated (both politically and financially) by the West for what he is not: another critical voice in a troubled and troubling region. Poverty, ineptitude, graft, corruption, injustice: all were no match for Western fear of creeping radical Islam, i.e. the Muslim Brotherhood. Mubarak’s spent his years making the most of Islamophobic rhetoric. In a nation that’s neither rich nor poor, African nor Middle Eastern, friendly nor hostile, familiar nor understood, Mubarak’s benefitted from playing the foil for Western projection. Continue Reading →
Mubarak’s Reality: Baksheesh
Hosni Mubarak didn’t contrive his I’m the preventer of chaos reality all alone. The tyrannical dictator of Egypt, who today told ABC’s Christiane Amanpour that he’d love to step down but can’t, has for three decades been appreciated (both politically and financially) by the West for what he is not: another critical voice in a troubled and troubling region. Poverty, ineptitude, graft, corruption, injustice: all were no match for Western fear of creeping radical Islam, i.e. the Muslim Brotherhood. Mubarak’s spent his years making the most of Islamophobic rhetoric. In a nation that’s neither rich nor poor, African nor Middle Eastern, friendly nor hostile, familiar nor understood, Mubarak’s benefitted from playing the foil for Western projection. Continue Reading →
Networking What?
A week after David Kato, a rights activist, was killed in Uganda, President Obama attends the National Prayer Breakfast. More on Kato at the New Yorker. Continue Reading →
The F-Word: Speaking with Krista Tippett
by Jo Piazza
It’s been four months since the Peabody-winning public radio program formerly known as “Speaking of Faith” changed its title to the more universal and spacious, “On Being.” The number of listeners writing into the show to tell host Krista Tippett they mourn the loss of the word “faith” has tapered to one a week.
The semantic change wasn’t undertaken lightly. Names imbue things with meaning, something Tippett is keenly aware of. Play a game of free association with the words “faith” and “being” with a mixed group of believers and nonbelievers and the words conjure very different connotations on each side of the spiritual spectrum. Faith – god, church, mosque, worship. Being – exist, doing, Hamlet’s soliloquy. Tippett knew the name change wouldn’t be simple and when she advocated for it two years ago plenty of people thought she was crazy to hijack the name of a brand when that brand was chugging along perfectly well.
“I knew it was the right thing to do but in implementing it I realized what a big deal it was. It was messy and it was interesting,” Tippett recently told The Revealer during an interview about the change and its aftermath. Continue Reading →
South Park Mormons
From Jo Piazza’s recent story at Fox News on the forthcoming broadway musical, “The Book of Mormon,” by the creators of “South Park”:
“What we will see on Broadway will be something challenging and irreverent, but also riveting, entertaining and ultimately loving,” Brooks said. “Frankly, when Mormons are able to laugh at ourselves is when we will ultimately be a mature world religion.”