Christianity

A Rift in the Iron Curtain :1. FROM HOLLYWOOD TO ROME

Taking advantage of what is left of my rights, I hereby serve notice of intention to join in the public discussions stirred up by President Truman's decision to send a United States ambassador to the Vatican. And if you expect me to be calm and politely restrained in my utterances, you're in for a disappointment. I was burned up about the encroachments of authoritarian clericalism long before the President's decision was announced. His latest stroke of statesmanship just added a little fuel to the flames which have been scaring my tender flesh. This is not a debate, properly speaking. From the...

A Rift in the Iron Curtain :1. FROM HOLLYWOOD TO ROME

Taking advantage of what is left of my rights, I hereby serve notice of intention to join in the public discussions stirred up by President Truman's decision to send a United States ambassador to the Vatican. And if you expect me to be calm and politely restrained in my utterances, you're in for a disappointment. I was burned up about the encroachments of authoritarian clericalism long before the President's decision was announced. His latest stroke of statesmanship just added a little fuel to the flames which have been scaring my tender flesh. This is not a debate, properly speaking. From the...

A Rift in the Iron Curtain :1. FROM HOLLYWOOD TO ROME

Taking advantage of what is left of my rights, I hereby serve notice of intention to join in the public discussions stirred up by President Truman's decision to send a United States ambassador to the Vatican. And if you expect me to be calm and politely restrained in my utterances, you're in for a disappointment. I was burned up about the encroachments of authoritarian clericalism long before the President's decision was announced. His latest stroke of statesmanship just added a little fuel to the flames which have been scaring my tender flesh. This is not a debate, properly speaking. From the...

A Rift in the Iron Curtain :1. FROM HOLLYWOOD TO ROME

Taking advantage of what is left of my rights, I hereby serve notice of intention to join in the public discussions stirred up by President Truman's decision to send a United States ambassador to the Vatican. And if you expect me to be calm and politely restrained in my utterances, you're in for a disappointment. I was burned up about the encroachments of authoritarian clericalism long before the President's decision was announced. His latest stroke of statesmanship just added a little fuel to the flames which have been scaring my tender flesh. This is not a debate, properly speaking. From the...

“Human liberation is too important to leave to chance”

When I was growing up, I remember being really confused about why some people had loads and other people didn’t. It seemed really unfair that I was well fed, clothed and schooled while other children didn’t go to school, or had to work, or went to bed hungry. I grew up in a really middle-class environment, and a lot of what some people said made me angry. When I was about eight, I said that people should be made to give up their wealth. Some adults would just scoff, or laugh at me, or say I would change my mind as I got older. I may only be twenty-five — but I haven’t yet changed my mind about...

Take all religion out of our schools!

A group of three academies, one other academy, and one council-controlled school in Birmingham have been put into “special measures” by Ofsted government inspectors for allegedly acting like “faith schools”. Ofsted complains that Park View school has weekly “Islamic-themed assemblies”, with invited speakers “not vetted”, and that from year 9 onwards religious education is almost all Islamic. Faith schools are explicitly allowed to have their assemblies, and their religious education, organised around their chosen religion, and to imbue other subjects with religious ideology. Over 35 per cent...

The Good Priest and our sins

Warning: plot spoiler! We are not in Sligo although it might seem so from time to time. We are in “the world” and when “the world” is the subject we have to expect a certain lack of realism and the onset of allegory. Who is going to kill the Roman Catholic priest (Brendan Gleeson) is the whodunit aspect, but the sins of “the world” and their victory are the real issue; and it fills the space between, on Sunday, a promise to kill the parish priest and, a week later, the murder itself. And what a week! Gay people in need of redemption, bankers with consciences, deeply cynical doctors high on...

Revolutionary politics, imperialism, and anti-racism: a further reply in the "Marxism and religion" controversy

Marcus Halaby’s polemic against Workers’ Liberty’s politics on religion, Islamism, and anti-imperialism ( “The AWL’s anti-anti-imperialist Islamophobia” ) is worth reading because it illustrates some differences between the political method of Workers Power and ourselves in Workers’ Liberty. Click here for the debate of which this is part, which started with a Facebook outcry in 2013 against the introduction to Workers' Liberty 3/1 of January 2006 Marcus expends more than 3,000 words before he reaches what he calls “the crux of the matter”: our disagreement on imperialism. We’ll start with it...

The Catholic Left in the 1960's

A review of Catholic Progressives in England after Vatican II by Jay P.Corrin (2013, University of Notre Dame Press). This examination of the Catholic left in England in the 1960's begins by outlining the history of the Church in the nineteenth and twentieth century when Catholics in Britain belonged to one of two culturally divergent groups: a massive majority of working-class Irish immigrants and their descendants and a much smaller minority of aristocratic recusant families who had held on to their faith following the English Reformation of the 1500's. This meant that not only were there...

Religious glue for right-wing politics

In Solidarity recently we have discussed how political Islam can be both a “sigh of the oppressed” and a reactionary, right-wing movement. The Christian right in the USA shows the same paradox more extravagantly. Thomas Frank, in his study of the rise of the right in Kansas, found that in Olathe, a poor Kansas City suburb which is a bastion of the right, “each of the conservatives I spent time with was either a blue-collar worker or married to one” He talked with one of the leaders of the right, Kay O’Connor, a working-class woman. She supports tax cuts for the rich. “Progressive taxation is...

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