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Sunday evening the Catholic diocese of Wilmington, Del. filed for bankruptcy protection — just ahead of the start of Monday morning trials to weigh the claims of potentially hundreds of victims of clergy sex abuse. This is big news here in the United States — and also abroad. As in the Irish Times article just referenced, it is being treated as a business story as well as, if not more, than a religion story.
The breaking religion-news story of the day is in Vatican City, with aftershocks in England. As has been rumored, literally, for years, Pope Benedict XVI has reached out to Anglican traditionalists, offering them an Anglican-friendly home in the Church of Rome. His activism in this area dates back to his days as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.
A couple of weeks ago, I harshed on the Los Angeles Times for its flippant and even silly treatment of the problems that arise from having sex in campus dorms. The hook for the story was that Tufts University enacted a policy forbidding sexual activity if the student’s roommate is present. The Times story never dealt with the morality of extra-marital sex or even just the morality of having sex in someone else’s unwilling presence or in their shared room. Instead it had a brief discussion of legal implications.
Cartoonist Robert Crumb went to San Francisco in 1967 and published his first issue of Zap Comix in 1968, introducing underground comic fans to Mr. Natural, an unstable holy man whose motto was: “Keep on Truckin.’”
Your GetReligionistas, as a rule, do not focus on op-ed page pieces very often. When we do so we try to focus on topics that will be of interest to mainstream journalists who cover religion news and news that veers into religion.
There’s something curious about the way the media have been handling the difficult and complicated story of Rifqa Bary. She’s the Ohio teenager (pictured here) who fled to Florida after she converted to Christianity over concerns her Muslim father might kill her. We last looked at this story when CNN inexplicably referred to the girl as “Muslim” even though the whole point of this saga is that she’s not.
Near-death experiences, phenomena that cross national, gender, age and religious lines, are a subject of great fascination to many here and around the world. The Amazon.com website has 15,908 possible links for books, starting with the “Big Book of Near-Death Experiences.” Little wonder if, as the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) says on its website, studies in the United States, Australia and Germany appear to suggest four to fifteen percent of the general population has had an NDE.
Let’s face it, progressives are on a roll at the University of Notre Dame, America’s most symbolic Catholic institution.
