Sarah Posner is not impressed by the latest
faith-based-coalition effort to prevent lawmakers in Washington from
sacrificing the nation's poor on the altar of deficit hawkery.
Mary Brown took to HuffPost Religion recently to highlight a Lilly-funded study that asked
laypeople what they want out of sermons. In short, it appears we want the
following:
In his combative response to President Obama's speech
last night, House Speaker John Boehner offered an uncommonly crystalized
rendition of an all too common bit of GOP nonsense.
The debt-ceiling fight is about politics, not policy. But
count on the news media to conflate the two—in service of the trope that everyone just needs to meet in the middle of wherever they
are right now.
A new Century editorial argues that unemployment, not the budget deficit,
is the most urgent economic problem facing the U.S. We need to deal with the
deficit at some point, but first we need to get people back to work by
stimulating the economy.
Last month I posted about Rais
Bhuiyan, the Muslim hate crime victim who is advocating
that his attacker, who shot Bhuiyan as part of a post-9/11 shooting spree in
which two other victims were killed, be spared the death penalty.
When the T-Mobile royal
wedding video went viral (look-alikes portray the principals and dance down the
aisle), much was made of the impressive stand-in for the Archbishop of
Canterbury.
The King James Bible's 400th birthday is everywhere. The current
issue of the Century features Jon
Sweeney's review of three books on the subject; earlier
this year, Timothy Larsen wrote lovingly of the Bible of his childhood.
Here's something that doesn't
happen everyday: Commonweal contributor
and Notre Dame professor Cathleen Kaveny agrees
with outspoken conservative Charles Chaput, the Catholic archbishop of Denver.
Woody Guthrie: American Radical, by Will Kaufman. I love musician
biographies; Humphrey Carpenter’s of Benjamin Britten is the most
fascinating book I’ve read in years. I also love Guthrie’s music--he’s
so much funnier and sharper-edged than the earnest troubadours who
mimicked him in the 60s--and I’ll read anything about politics.
