Earlier this week, the Catholic Church marked the feast day of SS Martha and Mary. In my post here, and in the comments thread for Kittredge Cherry’s corresponding post at Jesus in Love Blog, there was some attention given to…
Monthly Archives: July 2010
Abuse and Suicide: A Moving Reader’s Response
My post on the church’s culpability in youth suicide has brought this moving comment, which has brought me , quite literally, to tears. I reproduce it here for your consideration, with no further comment – I have no words that…
Gay Weddings Begin in Argentina
The first gay weddings under Argentina’s new family equality law have begun. (These are not the first gay marriages- a handful of couples were able to sneak in by earlier court challenges and sympathetic magistrates, but these at the first…
Suicide, Abuse, and the Catholic Church
One of my earliest memories from primary school religion lessons is that suicide is a grievous sin, one of the worst of all. If that is so, how serious is it to be responsible for another person’s suicide? And how…
Examining the Abuse Crisis in the Church: NCR Review
It’s been a while now since I wrote anything at all about the problems of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. That is not because I’ve lost interest, and still less because the problem has gone away – quite the…
Queering the Song of Songs
Gay men and women could be excused for feeling more than a little ambivalent about the Song of Songs as recommended reading. On the one hand, it is very emphatically and clearly a frankly erotic love song between two unmarried…
James Martin SJ on the “Future Church”: Sympathetic, Free of Fear?
To kick off my proposed series of discussions of the Patheos collection on the future of the Catholic Church, I begin with the vision of James Martin, SJ. Martin begins with a discussion of the problem of disagreement and dissent…
In the Driver’s Seat
Claudia so enjoyed her picnic outing on Saturday that she screamed blue bloody murder when it was time for me to go home, and I tried to leave her behind (at her home) with mother. She had other ideas. (This…
PCUSA Assembly, Rainbow Scarves.
I’ve already written about the General Assembly and its decisions affecting LGBT inclusion. This report from Huffington Post, though, with its emphasis on the rainbow scarves, prompted a fresh thought: what a contrast this is to the Catholic response to…
Gay Weddings, Cape Town
South Africa has provided full marriage equality for four years now. A report in the NYT featuring weddings in Cape Town has prompted some reflection on what makes the Saffer version of gay marriage special. First, the story of marriage…
