Opinion
COMMENTARY: Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
By Tracy Gordon — June 25, 2009
(UNDATED) When it comes to patriotic celebrations and the role of religion in America’s founding, views typically range from a nostalgic exaggeration of our Christian roots to an outright (and equally misleading) denial of religion’s role. To find the truth, it might help if we could return to two original founding documents, both of which […]
Mark, we hardly knew ye
By Mark Silk — June 25, 2009
In his at times barely comprehensible press conference remarks yesterday, Mark Sanford did manage to make it clear that he’d been spending time wandering through the woods of Bible-based therapy, seeking to recover his moral compass and repair his marriage. It’s about what one would expect of a Southern Republican politician these days. But Sanford […]
COMMENTARY: A heart is a terrible thing to waste
By Cathleen Falsani — June 24, 2009
(UNDATED) The hole in Vasco Sylvester’s heart isn’t there anymore. In a three-hour operation on June 10, surgeons at Hope Children’s Hospital outside Chicago, using a piece of white Gore-Tex, patched the quarter-size hole that had been there since Vasco was born. The doctors also removed an extra membrane between the top and bottom chambers […]
New Issue of RIN!
By Mark Silk — June 24, 2009
The latest issue of Religion in the News is now on line, for those of you who can’t wait for your hard copy. The cover story is Jerome Chanes’ look at how the Madoff scandal played in the Jewish press–and why it’s been such a huge disgrace in the Jewish world. In the Catholic world, […]
Confidence in Religion
By Mark Silk — June 24, 2009
According to a new Gallup poll, confidence in religion is up four points over the past year, with 52 percent of Americans now expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in “the church or organized religion.” The big winner in Gallup’s annual institutional confidence sweepstakes is the presidency, which shot up from […]
Reviving the SBC
By Mark Silk — June 24, 2009
One of the guilty pleasures I discovered during my turn in the South was following the Southern Baptist Convention, that huge grumpy quasi-denomination that once bestrode the region like a colossus. It’s fallen on hardish times of late, what with baptisms down and membership aging. To gin up institutional revival, SBC president Johnny Hunt last […]
COMMENTARY: To everything there is a season
By Tom Ehrich — June 23, 2009
NEW YORK — Fresh blueberries — local, affordable, not trucked in from 3,000 miles away — have hit the shops and street vendors. Life just got better. It feels magical. Just days ago, these blue morsels were absent, then the season changed, and now they are here. Next, we hope, will come the magic of […]
The Niebuhrian
By Mark Silk — June 23, 2009
There’s been a fair amount of div. school-type talk linking Barack Obama to Reinhold Niebuhr, the great political theologian of post-World War II America whose star has of late been in the ascendant. And indeed, Obama (unlike many a politician who once upon a time invoked him–e.g. Jimmy Carter) seems to have actually read and […]
Dodd embraces SSM
By Mark Silk — June 23, 2009
Sen. Chris Dodd, fighting for his political life here in Connecticut, has announced a change of heart on same-sex marriage: He now supports it. Anti-SSM professional Peter Wolfgang of the Family Institute of Connecticut calls Dodd out for political expediency: “He took a position against same-sex marriage when he was running for president because that […]
Notre Dame’s Pastor
By Mark Silk — June 22, 2009
Having discussed the matter in executive session and gotten out of Dodge…er San Antone, the Catholic bishops have now issued a statement on behalf of their comrade, the Ordinary of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, who criticized and boycotted his local Catholic university when it bestowed an honorary degree on the President of the […]
Faith-Based Future
By Mark Silk — June 22, 2009
Anyone interested in following the fortunes of Son of Faith Based: the Obama Years needs to download “Taking Stock: The Bush Faith-Based Initiative and What Lies Ahead,” a Pew-sponsored report of the Rockefeller Institute of Government’s Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy released this month. Author David J. Wright gives provides a fine (if […]
Enlightenment Nerds
By Mark Silk — June 22, 2009
According to John Hodgman, the framers of the Constitution “believed that God was a distant, uncaring dungeonmaster.”
God in Search of Highway
By Mark Silk — June 21, 2009
Props to Missouri for deciding to rename the stretch of highway cleaned up for adoption purposes by neo-Nazis after Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Jewish theologian who famously marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. Heschel, who had a nice feel for divine irony, would have been amused. The renaming is to take place this summer, […]
Takbir
By Mark Silk — June 21, 2009
The constant shouting of “Alahu Akhbar” (“God is Great”) by the protesters in Iran has got to be exquisitely annoying to the powers-that-be-shaking there. Known as the Takbir, the phrase is uttered at moments of strong emotion throughout the Muslim world. Along with the wearing of the green (the universal color of Islam), it signifies […]
Focus on Common Ground
By Mark Silk — June 19, 2009
Pastordan, whom book-writing has driven over to Religion Dispatches for the nonce, picks up on a post of mine to again sound the clarion against common ground-ism. Meanwhile, over at Focus on the Family, new top dog Jim Daly is barking a new tune: “When those who are right, left and center all say, ‘Let’s […]
