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Religion and Public Life With Mark Silk

Heads are exploding all over the Catholic Right (boom, boom, and boom) not because Pope Benedict has altered official Catholic teaching on condoms. (There is no official Catholic teaching on condoms per se.) It’s because (as the estimable Austin Ivereigh makes clear) Pope Benedict has countermanded what the Catholic Right would have you believe is…

Michele Bachmann is such a fan of faith-based initiatives that Bachmann and Associates, the Christian counseling center she co-owns with her husband, has received $30,000 in Minnesota state funds over the past three years. It’s a place where, according to Dr. Marcus Bachmann, Jesus Christ is the “Almighty Counselor.” Comes now the Park51 Islamic cultural…

So now Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi has gone to the mountain and come back with confirmation that the pope not only said what he meant but also meant what Austin Ivereigh said he meant–that the use of condoms for the sake of preventing infection was a step in the right moral direction for women…

That is the question. In the usual manner, there’s that tendency for those who like the way a papal statement sounds to make too much of it, and those who don’t, to make too little. And in the case of Benedict’s remarks on the use of condoms to prevent AIDS (“a first step in the…

Yesterday the White House put out its long-awaited executive order (reprinted after the jump) on the rules governing faith-based social service provision, and it’s a solid step forward over the 2002 Bush executive order it replaces. What it tracks, pretty closely, are the recommendations of the task force for reforming the Office of Faith-Based and…

By choosing New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan as their new president, the Catholic bishops opted to keep speaking loudly whatever the size of the stick they carry. Dolan is a glad-hander who, post-election, signaled that he’d be treading in the footsteps of his predecessor, Cardinal Francis George. George’s valedictory address was a paean to episcopal…

Of all the stories in American religion today, none may be more fascinating than the meltdown of the Antiochian Orthodox Church, the Levantine branch of Eastern Orthodoxy in America that has been led since 1966 by Metropolitan Philip Saliba. The denomination has done well under Philip’s leadership, multiplying parishes and expanding its membership not least…

If we take seriously Damon Linker’s call for giving political candidates a religious test, what should the test look like? Unfortunately, this whole testing thing seems to have been a bit of a marketing afterthought to his new book, The Religious Test: Why We Must Question the Religious Beliefs of Our Leaders. As a result,…

I was up at Boston College yesterday for an “author meets critics” session on Damon Linker’s provocative new book, The Religious Test, hosted by the Boisi Center. The other critic was Patrick Deneen of Georgetown, and the pregame chatter was about Jody Bottum’s summary dismissal as editor of First Things, for reasons that allegedly had…

Let me put in a plug for George Dennis O’Brien’s new book, The Church and Abortion: A Catholic Dissent. No doubt that last word will immediately cause many pro-life Catholics to turn away without a second thought. But as my friend Michael Sean Winters likes to emphasize about himself (e.g. here), it’s often from people…
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