(UNDATED) Many people leave religion and never turn back. For them, leaving religion is a permanent condition to be celebrated. But what do you do when you leave your religion, but your religion hasn’t left you? This question occurred to me as I read about Irish writer Colm Toibin’s visit to a Catholic church in […]

Gov. Lynch says he’ll sign same-sex marriage bill with more religious protections, thereby making it five out of six in New England. I have heard, and I understand, the very real feelings of same-sex couples that a separate system is not an equal system. That a civil law that differentiates between their committed relationships and […]

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A few days ago, Rod Dreher lamented the costs imposed by same-sex marriage (really gay rights altogether) on the scruples of those who have religious objections to SSM and gay rights. And he’s right, there are costs. The irony is that the Supreme Court’s 1990 Smith decision, written by social conservative Antonin Scalia, deprives these […]

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CHICAGO — Even bumper-to-bumper traffic at rush hour can be a blessing — when you see it through the eyes of a child who has never seen it before. One recent afternoon, on our way back to the suburbs from downtown Chicago,where he had his first piece of pizza and saw a Ferris wheel for […]

Given the array of signatories, I’m inclined to disagree with Pastordan’s worried judgment that Harry Knox, the faith guy for the Human Rights Campaign, will be dumped from the OFANP Advisory Council for remarks critical of Pope Benedict. If he listened to those folks, Obama would withdrawing from his Notre Dame speech and walking around […]

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RICHMOND, Va. — I was in a hotel 500 miles from home when my Apple iPhone refused to recharge. I felt strangely stranded, unable to manage my business, to communicate with family or to negotiate the scheduling intricacies of this trip. I went to a nearby AT&T store, the carrier that handles iPhones. “Can’t help,” […]

Michael Steele has apologized to Mitt Romney for telling the truth about his candidacy. As in: [R]emember, it was the base that rejected Mitt because of his switch on pro-life, from pro-choice to pro-life. It was the base that rejected Mitt because it had issues with Mormonism. Doubt it? Read this.

Among the five ways Obama is, in the view of Kristol’s latest WaPo column, “surprisingly vulnerable to political and substantive attack,” is his decision to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Kristol does not specify the nature of the president’s Guantanamo problem, contenting himself with the reflection that it is very like Jimmy Carter’s returning […]

Writing in the Guardian yesterday, Ed Kessler contends that the current pope is not seriously interested in Catholic-Jewish interchange: The central problem for Pope Benedict resides in his vision of the Catholic church. He sees it as a totally completed institution that does not need to learn anything new theologically from dialogue with other Christians […]

Last week, Politico’s Ben Smith reported that the Obama Administration had x’ed out funding for abstinence-only sex ed programs. Beloved as these are of social conservatives and their political watercarriers (cf. Administration, Bush), there’s no evidence that they actually work (Levi 1, Bristol 0). Also, liberals don’t believe in abstinence. (OK, OK.) Brody has leapt […]

A lot of people, even the odd Republican herself, are indulging in the thought experiment of imagining what the GOP should do to get its groove back. Open the doors to moderates! Throw social conservatives under the bus! Go back to basics! Stay the course! Unless I’m missing something, though, no one has proposed readjusting […]

The increasingly agitated, increasingly bishop-led anti-abortion crowd in the Catholic church gets a firm pop from the always mannerly Peter Steinfels in his NYT column today. Noting the 1-4 ratio of those joining and those leaving the church in America today, he concludes: Under normal circumstances, it is hard to imagine any institution’s leadership contemplating […]