A recent Religion News Service article on infamous Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong celebrates him as an aging maverick whose provocative sexual and theological stances supposedly are no longer controversial. At age 82, the former Bishop of Newark, New Jersey, is writing…
A Jesuit priest writing in the Jesuit magazine America has cited Winston Churchill’s destruction of the Vichy-controlled French fleet in 1940 as an example of gratuitous violence, like abortion or capital punishment. “Learning lessons from history, there [are] two mistakes…
According to some church officials, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has launched an attack on the poor by “cutting” $40 billion from food stamps. Typically unmentioned is that these “cuts” are reductions in increases over the next 10 years in…
Recently the last reputed survivor of Hitler’s Berlin bunker died, age 96. Rochus Misch was a fixture on cable television history channels. Always enthusiastic about recounting his eyewitness to history, one obituary recounts that in his final years he spontaneously…
Anti-Israel activism in U.S. church circles has increased in recent years especially among some evangelical elites. Mainline Protestant elites have been anti-Israel for decades. Last fall officials of several Mainline denominations urged Congress to reconsider U.S. military aid to Israel,…
Catholic thinker Jody Bottum’s recent controversial Commonweal essay suggested, “American Catholics should accept state recognition of same-sex marriage simply because they are Americans.” A bow to legally institutionalizing sexual liberalism has become the ticket to American civic engagement, it is…
The famed Christian ethicist Jean Bethke Elshtain of the University of Chicago died earlier this month. She was notable as the increasingly rare theologian willing vigorously to affirm America’s right to self-defense in the world, resisting the crosscurrents of pacifism…
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s signing into law a ban on professional counseling to change sexual orientation for minors has already ignited religious liberty and other concerns about state power. A similar California law is currently judicially blocked. Presumably Christie,…
This week marks the anniversaries of the atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II. The strikes killed 150-250,000, and the war killed 50-60 million, about a third of whom were killed by imperialist Japan’s aggression in…