{"id":7232,"date":"2004-05-24T09:09:42","date_gmt":"2004-05-24T09:09:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/good_stuff_from_spain.html"},"modified":"2004-05-24T09:09:42","modified_gmt":"2004-05-24T09:09:42","slug":"good_stuff_from_spain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/good_stuff_from_spain.html","title":{"rendered":"Good Stuff from Spain"},"content":{"rendered":"

New website, including a blog, from Robert Duncan, freelance writer, sometime commenter here and other places. Start with this interesting interview with John Allen and explore.<\/a><\/p>\n


\nR.D.: In your opinion is the Vatican out-of-touch and outdated, or is it just as relevant for today\u00b4s generation as it was for our parents and grandparents? <\/em><\/p>\n

J.A.: If by “out of touch” you really mean “counter-cultural,” certainly the Vatican takes positions on moral questions that would place it out of the mainstream in some parts of the developed world. It does not accept gay marriage, divorce, abortion or birth control, and certainly that challenges the liberal consensus
\nin many societies. <\/p>\n

On the other hand, it\u2019s hard to see how the Vatican is “irrelevant.” I watched the build-up to the Iraq war, for example, when Tony Blair, Jose Maria Aznar, Tarik Aziz, Koffi Annan, and other diplomatic heavyweights were rotating in and out of the Vatican like clients at a deli counter. It wasn\u2019t because they had nothing better to do; it was because John Paul II\u2019s position on the war was moving opinion, undercutting the moral argument for the intervention. <\/p>\n

Rarely has the Holy See been more relevant. The Vatican is, and will remain, an extraordinarily important global point of reference<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New website, including a blog, from Robert Duncan, freelance writer, sometime commenter here and other places. Start with this interesting interview with John Allen and explore. R.D.: In your opinion is the Vatican out-of-touch and outdated, or is it just as relevant for today\u00b4s generation as it was for our parents and grandparents? J.A.: If…<\/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-7232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nGood Stuff from Spain - 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\/2004\/05\/good_stuff_from_spain.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Good Stuff from Spain - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"New website, including a blog, from Robert Duncan, freelance writer, sometime commenter here and other places. 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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\/7232","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=7232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7232\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}