Soon after the white smoke rose from the roof of the Sistine Chapel, a Vatican official announced to the huge crowd gathered outside that “Habemus Papam!”—“We have a Pope!” Then Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, came out as well on the famous balcony and spoke to the crowd in fluent Italian (his […]

As usual, I was struck by two seemingly unrelated items reported by Religion News Service on February 28, 2013. I think they are worth being reflected upon together.The first story is about an action by the New York City Commission on Human Rights, which has decided to charge seven ultra-Orthodox Jewish businesses with gender discrimination. […]

As reported by Religion News Service and other media, on February 19, 2013, Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada appointed Andrew Bennett to be Ambassador for Religious Freedom. Bennett, a Catholic with a doctorate in political science from Edinburgh and dean of a small college in Ottawa, is to head a new Office on Religious […]

The surprising announcement by Benedict XVI that he will retire from the papacy in a few weeks’ time has naturally led to a flurry of media attention on the challenges facing the Roman Catholic Church (for once, mercifully, with a broader focus than the scandal of pedophile priests and their protective superiors). On February 15, […]

On February 8, 2013, The Christian Century carried an article by Lauren Markoe entitled “Did gun control prevent Jews from stopping the Holocaust?” It reported on what must be one of the most bizarre misuses of the Holocaust. As the debate over gun control has moved to the forefront of policy debates in the wake […]

Two gender-related issues have been all over the media recently. On January 24, 2013, the Pentagon announced that it was reversing the policy of barring women from combat roles in the military. On January 28, 2013, the Boy Scouts of America said that it was considering a reversal of the national ban on gay youth […]

January 22, 2013 was the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision by the Supreme Court which declared that abortion was a woman’s constitutional right. The occasion, as every year on that date, was observed by the annual March for Life in which many thousands converge on Washington to protest the legalization of […]

As readers of my blog have discovered (perhaps with a measure of irritation) my favorite cognitive style is free association. The following post is an exercise in putting together bits and pieces—in the event: flea markets, cowboys, hobos and the root insight of anarchism.This exercise was triggered by the issue of The Christian Century on […]

The Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University publishes a very informative electronic newsletter about religious developments all over the world. On January 12, 2013, the newsletter carried a story originally published in the Buffalo News, about Joelle Silver, a high school science teacher in a community in upstate New York […]

On January 7, 2013, the New York Times carried a story about the race to fill the Congressional seat in Chicago vacated by the resignation (apparently for both health and legal reasons) of Jesse Jackson, Jr. The district is still strongly African-American, though less so than it used to be because of recent remapping. The […]