A Sore Loser?
William A. Dinges, a professor of religious studies at The Catholic University of America, is steamed. Addressing a national gathering of 100 or so diocesan social-action leaders in Washington, D.C., Dinges says that “polarization” in the Catholic Church has reached a new peak with the 2004 presidential election (according to a Catholic News Service report, Feb. 22).
Who’s to blame? It’s largely the right-wing Catholics, who insisted that the election hinged on abortion and embryonic stem-cell research. Dinges says the rhetoric has been “vitriolic” and the behavior “uncivil,” being characterized by “confrontation, harassment and attempts at intimidation.”
Dinges deplores all this “rancor,” “incivility,” and “name-calling.”
You May Also Enjoy
It could safely be said that the Catholic Church invented active care for the poor. After all, our salvation depends upon it (cf. Mt. 25:31-46).
Anne Barbeau Gardiner takes on an author who has "made a career of treating the Bible sacrilegiously" and sees power, not Logos, as the ultimate reality.
Reviews of Doctrinal Standards in the Wesleyan Tradition... Correspondence of Flannery O'Connor and the Brainard Cheneys... Patrology, Volume IV: The Golden Age of Latin Patristic Literature... Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Exile and Return in the History of Judaism... The Ordeal of Civility: Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity... Against the Protestant Gnostics... Marxism and Religion: A Description and Assessment of the Marxist Critique of Christianity... Letters of Etienne Gilson to Henri de Lubac... Letters of Marshall McLuhan... The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe... First Steps in Prayer