Inspiration Faith & Prayer Health & Wellness Entertainment Love & Family
Newsletters Special Offers

Religion and Public Life With Mark Silk

The new set of canon law norms issued by the Vatican yesterday was intended to win some PR points on the sexual abuse front, but its substantive goal is to ensure that no Roman Catholic bishop starts ordaining women. Far from being a maladroit add-on to the list of “graver crimes” (graviora delicta) subject to…

If current trends hold.

Outright expressions of religious bigotry are pretty rare in American politics. Even the most religiously bigoted political party in American history, the antebellum American Party, was known as the Know-Nothing Party because its members were ashamed to own up publicly to their anti-Catholicism. Not so the National Republican Trust PAC. Right up on its website…

Ever alert for Republican wackiness, TPM calls our attention to a recent TV interview with Ed Martin, who’s got the GOP nomination to run against Rep. Russ Carnahan to represent Missouri’s Third District in Congress. One thing I like to say is: America is great, not because of our genetics. We’re great because we created…

Because GetReligion’s Mollie Hemingway is gracious enough to concede that I’ve offered the “best defense” of the Goodstein/Halbfinger NYT article on Pope Benedict’s performance as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), and because I was perhaps ungracious enough to smack her around a little in a subsequent post, let me…

In the clear light of the next morning, I guess I’m prepared to go some of the way with Jack Balkin’s critique  of Judge Tauro’s two DOMA decisions. The equal protection argument advanced in Gill is certainly in tension with the Tenth Amendment argument advanced in Commonwealth. If the right to define marriage is to…

U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro’s peroration in Gill v. Personnel Management: To further divide the class of married individuals into those with spouses of the same sex and those with spouses of the opposite sex is to create a distinction without meaning. And where, as here, “there is no reason to believe that the disadvantaged…

“Religion freedom rolled back by SCOTUS” proclaims yesterday’s post by Rod Dreher on the Supreme Court’s decision in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. Taking off from a post by Wendy Kaminer over at the Atlantic, Dreher claims the court “believes that it’s licit to protect other groups, while singling traditional Christians out for special discrimination.”…

Either Mitt and his advisers are blowing smoke or they don’t understand the religious dynamics of the Republican Party. I’m guessing the latter. In a piece in the Boston Globe a few days ago, Sasha Issenberg reports that looking toward 2012, the Romney camp has decided to forgo the 2008 strategy of trying to win…

Notwithstanding Michael Sean Winters at NCR, R.R. Reno at First Thoughts, Rod Dreher at Beliefnet, and Mollie Ziegler Hemingway at GetReligion, the big takeout by Laurie Goodstein and David M. Halbfinger in last Friday’s NYT is no hatchet job. It is, by my lights, a piece of balanced, well contextualized reporting that added some essential…
archives most recent
search this blog
More from Beliefnet and our partners