The chapel at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary is in the process of becoming a spectacle of nepotism, cronyism and ostentatious self-importance. This is the 12 year project of the wife of one of the leaders of the conservative take-over of the Southern Baptist Convention. It is her "dream" to memorialize dozens of SBC conservative faction leaders in stained glass in the chapel Southwest Baptist Theological Seminary.  Dorothy Patterson, wife of current seminary President and erstwhile conservative insurgent, Paige Patterson, was recently featured in a front page story about her project in the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram.  

Next year, the Pattersons will be among the first to be immortalized in a stained glass window together.

Baptist writer Alan Bean thinks all this is premature, at best. Bean writes:

My initial reaction to all this eulogizing of faith heroes, most of whom are still with us, was distinctly negative. It seemed tacky and a bit presumptuous. Shouldn't we wait for the verdict of history? Don't we normally reserve stained-glass windows for genuine heroes of the faith who are acknowledged inside and outside the limited circle of our faith tradition?

I recently taped an interview with Freedom's Ring Radio, a nationally syndicated weekly broadcast produced by the Church State Council in cooperation with the North American Religious Liberty Association, which is a ministry of the Pacific Union Council of the Seventh Day Adventists.

My conversation with host Alan J. Reinach began with the historic and growing alliance of the Catholic Bishops and the Protestant evangelicals of the Christian Right. We went from there into a discussion of how the struggle over the rights of conscience of people both for and against marriage equality, among other things, are increasingly defined in terms of religious liberty.  The interview is scheduled to air nationwide on December 29th.  The podcast is available here.

Catholic University of America (CUA) in Washington, DC recently set off a firestorm when it announced it has accepted a $1 million grant from the Charles Koch Foundation. The Washington Post reported, "The grant to Catholic will enable the university's new School of Business and Economics to recruit and hire four visiting scholars to conduct research on `principled entrepreneurship.'"

But CUA has also been the unofficial home base for Catholic advocacy of Distributive Justice in the United States  since the early 20th century.  Distributive Justice's greatest clerical proponent, Msgr. John A. Ryan, was a towering fixture at the University at the time.  All this has left advocates of Distributive Justice concerned that the Koch cash is really a Trojan Horse for Catholic Right libertarianism.

A sympathetic reading of the recent remark by Pope Francis would be that he was trying to say the right thing about the nature of Christianity when he stumbled. A less sympathetic reading would suggest that Francis and the Church generally has a very long way to go in showing respect for non-Catholics.

Whatever one thinks of Pope Francis, the cult of celebrity is obscuring at least as much as it is revealing about the state of the church and even the direction of this papacy. This is something to which everyone who values religious pluralism and separation of church and state needs to keep both an open ear and an open mind.

The occasion for this post is how astounded I was when I read how Francis, in an apparent effort to denounce religious supremacism, engaged in religious bigotry and supremacism himself.

There is no doubting that Pope Francis is a different kind of Pope; he seems to be kinder, gentler, friendlier, and less judgmental. He appears to be more open, more humble, less full of himself, willing to make changes at the Vatican, and he's living a simpler life than most of the previous occupants of the Holy See. He's also much more media savvy than his predecessors. Although some progressives are leaping out of their Chuck Taylor All-Stars to get on board Pope Francis' social justice Pope-mobile - and there's nothing wrong with that -- it remains to be seen whether anything concrete comes out of the Pope's critique of trickle down economics and capitalism run amok.

Some, however, see the Pope's focus on the poor as part of a larger public relations campaign to draw in wayward Catholics and rebuild the reputation of the Church. In that regard, the Pope's recent exhortation ("Evangelii Gaudium") has already accomplished a few things: it has exposed some of the conservative critics of the Catholic Church's teachings on social justice for being hypocritical blowhards; and, news about the Church's financial and sexual scandals have all but disappeared from view.

Over the weekend, you might have seen a news story with a headline like, "Court Strikes Down Utah Polygamy Law."

If all you read was the headline, you might assume that polygamy was once again legal in Utah. It's not. Instead, the state has been told not to interfere in religious ceremonies that, while they may have meaning for the people who take part in them, bestow no government recognition.

Daily Kos: Jed Lewison reports that Fox News personality Mike Huckabee is thinking about running for president (again) in 2016. We will no doubt hear much about this over the next little while.  But whatever Huckabee says or does, I will always remember his cheap demagoguery following the mass murder of elementary school children in Newtown, CT.  Huckabee not only sought to blame the massacre on how we navigate matters of religion in the public schools, but to head off future school shootings, he suggested that people who think like him be deployed to hector school children about learning to fear "a holy God in judgment."  

The Guardian reports that a Scottish Catholic priest is suing the Church for wrongful termination of employment. It seems that the Church waged a vilification campaign against him after he spoke out publicly about the problem of sex abuse in the church. The Bishop then fired him while he was being treated for cancer.

BBC reports that controversy is growing over the 1994 book To Train Up a Child by Michael & Debi Pearl, which "is widely seen as the most extreme of the publications produced by conservative Christians in the US who advocate corporal punishment. The book, which is said to have sold hundreds of thousands of copies, is widely used by homeschooling parents in the U.S. The book is published by the Pearls' organization, No Greater Joy Ministries, which is attached to the church where Michael Pearl is a pastor in Pleasantville, Tennessee.  

What did the late Nelson Mandela say about Israel and Apartheid? Even before Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused to attend the memorial service for Mandela, the Internet was abloom with information planted on the shifting sands of incompetent fact-checking.

Now, I hasten to add that attempting to correct misinformation, disinformation, and just plain old lies on the Internet is akin to trying to delete a glacier with an icepick. But Mandela was a man of integrity, so he deserves a brief attempt to correct the record--if for no other reason that he hoped for the day that Israelis and Palestinians could live in peace. Antisemitism and Islamophobia always spread faster than the truth can put on its boots, to paraphrase an often misattributed quote.

Let's start with Netanyahu's decision and work from there.

Over at Haaretz Bradley Burston opined that there was a special place in Hell for Netanyahu, who is widely known as "Bibi" by friends and foe alike. According to Burston, by cancelling his planned trip to the "Mandela funeral as too costly, Bibi shows world what he's truly made of." Burston added that "Israel's prime minister proves he is not the smug, petty, vindictive, waffling, in-your-face insulting man he seems. He's something worse."

According to Burston, Netanyahu's snub shows that Netanyahu "does not consider a man like Nelson Mandela, or a nation like South Africa, or the sentiment of an entire world, worth the price of a plane flight."

"A few supervisors refused to hand out the forms that included questions on church affiliations. Some workers feared losing their jobs if they did not sign. They included Jews, Muslims and Hindus, gays and lesbians, atheists and even a lapsed Salvation Army member, employees said." -- New York Times, February 2, 2004, A Religious Renewal at the Salvation Army Raises the Threat of a Church-State Dispute

Almost every day at my local supermarket, I pass by a Salvation Army bell ringer who, by now, knows that I won't drop any money in his kettle. I feel bad about it. The bell ringer is probably down on his luck, and SA management would likely smile were he to bring in a fuller kettle. But I can't do it, because I just can't get the Salvation Army's purge of gays and Jews out of my head.

A few months ago I wrote about how the child sex abuse crisis in evangelical Christianity, although less reported, is at least as bad as it is in the Catholic Church. Taken together, this suggests that there is a crisis of a different kind looming for the leaders of the Religious Right, whose concern for the victims of abuse has been too muted, and too often belated when it is evident at all. There is also too often an obvious and alarming tendency to sympathize and side with the abuser over the victims. The proud defenders of what they call "family values" become bizarre self-parodies, at best, under such circumstances.  

There are signs that accountability is coming.

This week as the the world considers the life of Nelson Mandela, a leading advocate for victims of sex abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention offered a remarkable idea.
Christa Brown of Stop Baptist Predators suggested a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, modeled on the one that helped South Africans put the horrors of apartheid behind them, might help the Southern Baptist Convention come to grips with it's child sex abuse scandal.  She thinks that Baptist leaders have been long on reconciliation and short on truth, and that maybe a comprehensive effort at both might help.

When a mob of conservative commentators led by Rush Limbaugh and Fox Business News morning host Stuart Varney recently red-baited Pope Francis, many of us wondered what the self-appointed defender of all-things-Catholic William Donohue would say.

As it turned out, given the choice between movement conservatives and those in line with Catholic economic teachings, the President of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights attacked the pope's defenders.

Now we know.  But most of us are probably not surprised.

In the 1980s some members of the Black Christian right saw such a danger from communism, socialism and liberalism to the free enterprise system and traditional God-centered family life that they were able to rationalize coalitions with fascists so long as they were sufficiently anti-communist.

The issue came up after the death of Nelson Mandela when White pundits on network television tried to paint President Ronald Reagan as supportive of Mandela and the struggle against apartheid. This Orwellian lie was quickly slapped down by the Reverend Al Sharpton. (See video excerpt here). See also: "Rush Limbaugh: Mandela ‘Has More in Common with Clarence Thomas Than Barack Obama’

Journalist Bill Berkowitz has detailed much of the background in his article "The Conservative Movement's Long-Time Hate Affair With Nelson Mandela." which is also online here at Talk to Action

Thomas was appointed to the US Supreme Court by President Bush, but Thomas had close ties to the Reagan Administration.