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Religion and Public Life With Mark Silk

As it rose to power in the late 1850s, the Republican Party absorbed the anti-Catholic populists of the American Party who live in historical memory as the Know-Nothings. So called because they denied all knowledge of what their party stood for, the Know-Nothings contributed a nativist gene to the GOP that it has never managed…

It could be argued that the sins of Dublin auxiliary bishops Raymond Field and Eamonn Walsh, as laid out in the Murphy Report, didn’t amount to much. Both, it seemed, failed in their duty to pursue and/or adequately report an allegation of sexual abuse by a priest. But, under pressure from their superior, Archbishop Diarmuid…

We don’t do a lot of religion in electoral politics here in the Land of Steady Habits, so when it’s introduced into a race for public office those of us in the biz take note. Thus, I offer for your consideration Martha Dean, who yesterday beat out a moderate Republican and became the GOP candidate…

I’ve been waiting around for some reaction to the Proposition 8 decision from my friends at bien-pensant Catholic blogs like America‘s In All Things and Commonweal‘s dotCommonweal and the National Catholic Reporter‘s NCR Today, but so far to almost no avail. Michael Sean Winters did issue a critique of Judge Walker’s decision, based on a…

Ross Douthat’s defense of Lifelong Heterosexual Monogamy (LHM) in today’s New York Times is judged by Andrew Sullivan to be “Ross is at his most Catholic.” I’d say just the opposite–if “most Catholic” has anything to do with the church’s embrace of natural law argumentation. For the latter holds that one-man-one-woman marriage is written into…

In her round-up of anti-mosque protests in yesterday’s New York Times, Laurie Goodstein found her way to Diana Serafin, an unemployed California grandmother who’s been frequenting Tea Party events and anti-immigration rallies. She said they read books by critics of Islam, including former Muslims like Walid Shoebat, Wafa Sultan and Manoucher Bakh. She also attended…

“Do the citizens of a state have the right to define legal marriage as a man-woman relationship? Or can courts overrule them on behalf of same-sex marriage?” So Russell Shaw began a piece in that avatar of Catholic conservatism, Our Sunday Visitor, a couple of weeks ago. Shaw went on to acknowledge that courts have…

By voting unanimously to deny landmark status to the building on the site of the planned Islamic Center near Ground Zero, the New York City Landmarks Commission gave a well-deserved Bronx cheer to Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Rick Lazio, and the horse the ADL rode in on to further the cause of anti-Muslim bigotry that…

David O’Connell, the former president of the Catholic University who was anointed coadjutor bishop of Trenton last weekend, may be a great guy–but given all that’s been happening in the church over the past few months, his allocution left me cold. His official episcopal slogan, Ministrare non ministrari–to serve rather than to be served–sounds humble…

Criticism of the Anti-Defamation League’s opposition to Cordoba House, the Islamic center proposed to be built two blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, has been widespread and well-deserved. Stephen Prothero has a sharp essay over at CNN’s Belief blog, as does Peter Beinart on the Daily Beast. Beinart makes the important point…
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