Historically a Catholic country, Brazil has been facing a religious transition since the 1990s, when what had been a steady growth of Evangelical Protestantism began to accelerate. According to some experts, Brazilian Evangelicals could become a majority in the country as soon as 2032. This phenomenon is particularly strong in the Amazon, where some states Read more
Thirty years ago, Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople put September 1 on the Orthodox calendar as the World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation. Last month, Pope Francis did the same for the Catholic Church and on Sunday marked the occasion by issuing a new message on climate change. Moving beyond his 2015 encyclical Read more
My first relationship to desire was to give in to it. As a teenager in the early aughts, I believed that life was found by identifying my desires and rushing toward their satisfaction. I played this out in academics and especially in sexuality. My life beat to the pulse of Ariana Grande’s chant, “I see Read more
In the sprawling Amazon region, the Catholic Church is severely short on priests. Clerics trek from one town to the next, sometimes requiring military transport to get to their remote destinations. Communities can go months without a visit. The church, as a result, is struggling to hold its influence. One new proposal to ease the Read more
There are a few ways you can lose your religion – in a slow drift where the time between mass attendance and sacraments like confession gets longer and longer, until you can’t in good faith claim to be a member of the flock any more. And then there’s the frank event, where something happens and Read more
Midway through 2018, I was packing to give a talk to a group of Catholics. Glancing at my phone, I saw what lay ahead: delayed flights through four cities, an arrival long after midnight, jet lag, a meet-and-greet, the talk with a Q. and A. afterwards, and a 4 a.m. wake-up call the next day Read more
Many Protestants have expressed righteous sadness at the sexual crimes in the faith traditions around us, namely the Catholic Church, while remaining indifferent to similar crimes within our congregations. We believe Protestant churches are safer. We are wrong. I know this from personal experience. Both my youth minister and pastor sexually abused me in my Read more
One of the big challenges of our time is to not let ourselves by drowned in bits and pieces of information. Information is very important. But on its own information is not wisdom. It isn’t even knowledge until it is properly sifted and researched. Wisdom is the ability to discern and judge how knowledge applies Read more
In October 2014, Ezekiel Emanuel published an essay in the Atlantic called “Why I Hope to Die at 75.” Because Emanuel is a medical doctor and chair of the University of Pennsylvania’s department of medical ethics and health policy, as well as a chief architect of Obamacare, the article stirred enormous controversy. Emanuel vowed to Read more
Like many of Jesus’ parables, the parable of the prodigal son in the Gospel of Luke features an all-male cast. There is the father, loving and merciful, the older son, judgmental and testy, and the younger son, thoughtless and hedonistic. I have been encouraged by many homilists over the years to cast myself in the Read more