A startling sexual abuse scandal recently broke out in Great Britain. The villain was the late Sir Jimmy Savile, a celebrated (if talent-free) BBC disc jockey and children’s TV-show host who, it turns out, serially abused young women for four decades”perhaps as many as a thousand girls, according to investigators from Scotland Yard, one of the fourteen police jurisdictions digging into his crimes. … Continue Reading »
Hobby Lobby, an Oklahoma City-based chain of arts-and-crafts stores, must provide employee health insurance that covers abortion-inducing drugs, a federal judge has ruled, despite the owners’ claim that such drugs violate their religious beliefs… . Continue Reading »
The editorial board of the National Catholic Reporter this week endorsed the ordination of women. Basing its position on a 1976 vote by the Pontifical Biblical Commission, on “countless conversations in parish halls, lecture halls and family gatherings,” and on the supposed support of myriad unnamed bishops, the Reporter calls “for the Catholic church to correct this unjust teaching.” … Continue Reading »
In the forthcoming issue of the journal Sociology of Religion, sociologist Philip Schwadel reports that between 1974 and 2010, the “probability of reporting a strong religious affiliation declined considerably among Catholics” in the U.S. and “increased among evangelical Protestants.” The thing is, this is not necessarily quite the bad news it might sound to be for Catholics, and not quite the good news it might sound to be for Evangelicals… . Continue Reading »
As anxious as many Christians are about religious freedom in America, nothing we’ve experienced”and God willing, never will”comes close to the brutal persecution of Christians abroad. The stunning extent of this persecution is documented in Times Literary Supplement religion editor Rupert Shortt’s evenhanded and unsettling new book, Christianophobia: A Faith Under Attack… . Continue Reading »
“His recently published last testament has stunned the Vatican” and “rocked the ecclesiastical establishment,” declares the English writer Jonathan Aitken, writing of Cardinal Carlo Martini’s last interview. It’s the standard line in secular reporting, when a liberal Catholic has said something the secular reporter wants him to have said… . Continue Reading »
Some years before he was elected pope, Joseph Ratzinger was asked what he thought about the health of the Church. He answered that she was doing very well; she was just a lot smaller than most people thought. He was exactly right. We need to think of the Church in our age as a seed of life embedded in layers of dead tissue. We also need to distinguish the Church in the emerging world from the Church in developed nations… . Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
