Terry Mattingly

News flash! Eastern Rite priests get married

Every now and then it seems that a story in the mainstream press gets under the skin of GetReligion readers and quite a few drop us notes pointing toward the same URL. This time around, it was a story in the New York Times that ran under the headline, “A Flock Grows Right at Home for a Priest in Ukraine.”


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Got news? Why did Stupak back down?

It’s the question hidden in many of the angry whispers in some corners of Washington, as well as the question behind the stunning plot twist that launched those public celebrations among the supporters of the Senate health-care reform bill.


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An Aggie nerd considers his path

There is so, so much to like in the recent Dallas Morning News profile of a young Texan who is wrestling with the ultimate decision of whether or not to become a monk in the Cistercian community at Our Lady of Dallas, a monastery in Irving, near Dallas.


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Health care: So who is cheering?

As you would expect, my morning email was full of angry press statements from conservative groups — with a heavy evangelical-right flavor. Most of the emails attacked Rep. Bart Stupak and his circle of Democrats who, in the end, agreed to back the U.S. Senate health-care reform legislation, after President Barack Obama agreed to issue an executive order clarifying that this bill would not end the ban on federal funding of abortions.


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Parsing the abortion language

So it appears that we are staggering to the finish line on this health-care reform bill — maybe. To no one’s surprise, or, at least, no one who has paid any attention to American politics for several decades, the key dividing line continues to be abortion.


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The camel's nose called 'evangelism'

Before we look at the journalistic essay that has me so hot and bothered, let us pause and read two crucial passages in a document that used to be dear to the heart of old-fashioned liberals — the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This cornerstone of human-rights work was proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948.


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