{"id":6349,"date":"2005-12-15T13:56:40","date_gmt":"2005-12-15T13:56:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/12\/clearing-things-up.html"},"modified":"2005-12-15T13:56:40","modified_gmt":"2005-12-15T13:56:40","slug":"clearing-things-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/12\/clearing-things-up.html","title":{"rendered":"Clearing things up"},"content":{"rendered":"

George Weigel on Mayor Menino of Boston’s "Catholic Fallacies."<\/a><\/p>\n

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So it seems that Menino knows neither the Bible, nor the catechism, nor the teaching of popes and bishops. Why should anyone beyond Catholics care? Because Americans will continue to debate the role of religiously informed moral reason in public life. That debate can be intelligent or dumb; it can strengthen democracy or weaken it; it can build bridges of understanding through serious conversation or fracture communities and stoke animosities. If political leaders like Mayor Menino continue to promote caricatures and cartoons of Catholic conviction, the debate will be unintelligible and fractious. And American democracy will be the weaker for it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

George Weigel on Mayor Menino of Boston’s "Catholic Fallacies." So it seems that Menino knows neither the Bible, nor the catechism, nor the teaching of popes and bishops. Why should anyone beyond Catholics care? Because Americans will continue to debate the role of religiously informed moral reason in public life. That debate can be intelligent…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nClearing things up - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/12\/clearing-things-up.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Clearing things up - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"George Weigel on Mayor Menino of Boston’s "Catholic Fallacies." So it seems that Menino knows neither the Bible, nor the catechism, nor the teaching of popes and bishops. Why should anyone beyond Catholics care? Because Americans will continue to debate the role of religiously informed moral reason in public life. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}