Rap Sheet
Links on R&P from around the web
Hey Religion Writers: You’re Doing it Again!
posted on July 10, 2012At The Revealer, Amy Levin accuses religion writers of producing “a repulsive plague of repetition and banality [that] has swept over the disenchanted cybersphere.” She tackles five common tactics she has noticed. Number one on her list? The use of “the loaded term.” She criticizes the loaded term “religious freedom,” a phrase “that is so strategically obscure that any blogger, journalist, academic, theologian, etc., can logically apply it to any number of causes.”
God’s Bankers
posted on July 10, 2012The Economist chronicles intrigue at the Vatican over Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the pope’s secretary of state. Recently, Bertone fired the head of the Vatican Bank and had the papal butler jailed for leaking documents. Throughout his embattled tenure, Bertone has been suspected of “trying to pack the next conclave: the assembly of cardinals that will elect the next pope.” Though Pope Benedict has stood by Bertone, The Economist concludes that “as long as the secretary of state stays, the infighting in the Vatican seems likely to continue, and the outside world’s grave concerns about its administration will remain.”
Defusing “Mein Kampf”
posted on July 10, 2012At The Chronicle of Higher Education, Paul Hockenos outlines the controversial history of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Banned from being published in Germany after World War II, the book remains a divisive piece of German history. A group of scholars at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich plan on releasing an annotated version of the book once the publishing ban expires in 2015. Christian Hartmann, the group’s leader, says, “We intend to defuse the book. This way it will lose its symbolic value and become what it really is: a piece of historical evidence—nothing more.”
Read at The Chronicle of Higher Education
Gay Marriage at Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly Voted Down
posted on July 9, 2012America’s largest Presbyterian denomination rejected a proposal to create “a path to same-sex marriage ceremonies in the church,” reports Jaweed Kaleem at The Huffington Post. At their biennial meeting in Pittsburgh, leaders of the Presbyterian Church (USA) voted not to change the church’s “Book of Order” to define marriage as between “two people” from the current definition of marriage as between “a man and a woman.” “But the climate for a same-sex marriage vote could be on the activists’ side in the future,” writes Kaleem. “During deliberations and several votes on different versions of marriage proposals … younger members of the church expressed support for same-sex marriage much more strongly than the church’s older members.”
The Clash That Wasn’t
posted on July 9, 2012At The Christian Century, Philip Jenkins points to the thriving Christian community in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation, to suggest that Muslim and Christian civilizations are not headed toward inevitable global conflict, as has long been predicted. “Christians [in Indonesia] are doing far better than the normal stereotypes of interfaith tension would suggest,” writes Jenkins. “Somehow, newspapers never publish banner headlines announcing ‘World’s Largest Muslim State Fails to Persecute Christians’ or ‘Civilizations Not Clashing!'”
Neighborhood Chair Drops MTC Fight after Message from Church
posted on July 9, 2012At The Daily Herald (Provo, Utah) Genelle Pugmire reports that Paul Evans, the chair of a neighborhood group that opposes the construction of a 9-story building on the campus of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ (LDS) Missionary Training Center (MTC) in Provo, Utah, has “buckled to pressure from the church and is bowing out.” Evans, a member of the LDS Church, said last week that he had received “an invitation” from a member church’s hierarchy “to support the decision of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles to build a 9-story building at the Provo Missionary Training Center … I accepted the invitation,” Evans said.
Barney Frank Weds Jim Ready
posted on July 9, 2012This past weekend, in a ceremony officiated by Massachusetts’ governor, Deval Patrick, Representative Barney Frank, married his longtime boyfriend, Jim Ready, reports Michael M. Grynbaum for The New York Times. The two met in 2005 at a political fundraiser where Ready told Frank that “I had a crush on him for 20 years.” Ready was a teenager in 1987 when Frank became “the first sitting member of Congress to volunteer that he was gay,” writes Grynbaum. “He is now the first to be married to a partner of the same sex.”
In Politics, Ethics Matter More than Issues
posted on July 9, 2012At CNN, Paul Root Wolpe argues that when evaluating a presidential candidate, Americans should concern themselves less with a potential president’s stance on the issues and more with his or her character. “When we care about a candidate’s character, we are really asking, Is this person authentic?,” writes Wolpe. “Are their positions a true reflection of their inner values, or are they politically expedient?”
Don’t Draft the Ultra-Orthodox
posted on July 9, 2012At Tablet, Liel Leibovitz argues that the Israeli government should not move forward with its plan to draft “yeshiva students” who are currently exempt from service in the Israeli Armed Forces. “There are many reasons why abandoning the silly insistence on mandatory conscription makes perfect sense,” writes Leibovitz. “First among them is basic human dignity: Rather than treating the ultra-Orthodox like a foreign element, Israeli society would do well to opt for a solution that’s more welcoming and respectful. But the chief reason not to draft the ultra-Orthodox is that the army couldn’t need them less.”
New Sanctuary Movement at the Border Can Spiritually Transform Us
posted on July 9, 2012At The National Catholic Reporter, John Fife describes the “Sanctuary Movement” that he co-founded on the United States’ southwestern border in the 1980s. Fife, the pastor of the Southside Presbyterian Church in Tuscon, Arizona, writes that members of his church and other religious groups “on both sides of the border” provided food, shelter, medical care, and legal aid for the “refugees from the death squads, torture and massacres of villages in El Salvador and Guatemala [who] were arriving at the border.” Fife writes, “If the election this fall does not result in comprehensive immigration reform legislation, I expect that the New Sanctuary Movement will grow more rapidly than the old one of the 1980s.”
Read at National Catholic Reporter