On Tuesday this week, the Catholic Church was once again thrust into the limelight when a grand jury released a scathing report. The report documented horrific torture and sexual abuse of over 1,000 children at the hands of 300 priests in six of eight Pennsylvania dioceses. It also detailed the extreme extent the Church went…
As a Jew who spent her formative years receiving a Jewish education, studying Jewish history in depth, my relationship with Catholicism is complicated. Jewish history is a trail of bloody tears — dotted with atrocities committed during the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, and the countless pogroms instigated by the Catholic Church — marking the Jewish…
When I was about 8 years old, in the early 1960s, on a long car trip to see relatives in New York, we passed through St. Louis, my father’s hometown. We dropped by a home in the suburbs to visit a couple I’d never met. I was told they were my Uncle Dave and Aunt…
When questioning appeals court judicial nominee Amy Coney Barrett, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein expressed her concern that “dogma lives loudly” within the would-be judge. Now Feinstein’s comments made during a confirmation hearing by the Senate Judiciary Committee, are drawing a wave of criticism for their insensitivity toward people of faith and the suggestion that devout…
A Senate Judiciary Committee hearing for Amy Coney Barrett took what critics feel was an anti-Catholic undertone when Dianne Feinstein, a Democratic senator in California, questioned the nominee’s “dogma.” Feinstein sharply quizzed Barrett, who was nominated by President Trump to serve on a federal appeals court. “The dogma lives loudly within you,” Feinstein said. “And…
She was 22 when she was sold to a high-ranking soldier in the Islamic State group. And she knew she was privileged, getting a high-ranking husband. After all, most Yazidi girls are sold 25 times at minimum. Being owned by a high-ranking official meant she would most likely be kept for longer. Every morning, her…
In her essay, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” Susan Sontag writes that “the artist who creates silence or emptiness must produce something dialectical: a full void, an enriching emptiness, a resonating or eloquent silence.” Though Sontag never mentions the work of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (of whom she could hardly have been aware at the time),…
In his push to open up Catholic communion to the divorced and remarried, Pope Francis has portrayed his critics as stubborn legalists and Pharisees who “sit in the chair of Moses and judge.” It’s language that, for at least one rabbi, evokes anti-Jewish stereotypes. The flare-up was highlighted in the religious journal First Things. In…
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