We wholeheartedly second the invitation by Australian Bishop Geoffrey Robinson for a thorough and honest reexamination of the church’s teaching on sexuality. (See story.) Robinson’s invitation, coming in a paper delivered in Baltimore at a conference sponsored by New Ways Ministry, is a gentle but elegant plea that offers hope for Catholics who want to stop the church’s headlong plunge into irrelevancy as a moral voice in our culture.
Stripped of its supernatural elements, does religion have anything to offer atheists? What can nonbelievers borrow from the organizations, practices and rituals of believers -- without borrowing a belief in God?
According to Swiss philosopher Alain de Botton, a lot.
In his new book, Religion For Atheists: A Non-believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion, he outlines an array of things he contends religions get right and that atheists can adopt to create a better, richer secular society.
"The starting point of all religions is that humans are weak and vulnerable and needing direction," de Botton said shortly after arriving in the United States from his home in England to promote the book.
"But as I look at secular society, I see how we've been abandoned to make our own way through life and how challenging that is."
Religion, de Botton writes, has a lot to say about how to live and love, caring for others, handling suffering, dealing with death and all the other universal experiences that make us human.
And while he is not suggesting that atheists adopt a belief, he argues that atheists ignore religion's wisdom at their peril.
Thousands of atheists and nonbelievers will gather Saturday on the National Mall in Washington for the Reason Rally, a daylong event featuring speakers, music and comedy to promote secular values.
The goal of the event is to "unify, energize and embolden secular people nationwide," said Jesse Galef, a Reason Rally spokesman.
"For this many of us to come together is hopefully a sign of things to come," Galef said. "Greater organization, greater cooperation and greater awareness nationally of who we are."
Organization and participation within the secular movement is growing. Atheists held their first mass gathering on the National Mall in 2002, with "The Godless March on Washington," an event that attracted 2,000 participants, according to news reports at the time. As many as 30,000 people are expected to attend this year's event.
The growing visibility mirrors the growth of secular Americans overall. The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey found that 15 percent of American adults identify as having no religion -- up from 8.1 percent in 1990.
Essay
Sunday marked the 800th anniversary of the founding of the Poor Clares, the second of the Franciscan orders. Eight hundred years ago on that day, the 18-year-old Chiara Favorone, whom we now know as Clare of Assisi, went to church with her family. It was a Sunday, but not just any Sunday.
LENT
They came to a place called Gethsemane, and he said to his disciples, "Sit here while I pray. My soul is sorrowful even to death." He prayed to his Father: "Take this cup away from me, but not what I will but what you will." (Mark 14:32-36)
Were you frightened in the garden, Jesus? You knew they were coming to get you, but did you know what would happen next? I guess you knew some of it because you knew the scriptures. But you didn’t know how it would feel, how it would hurt, how degrading it would be, how lost you would feel, how alone you would be. Your fear must have been overpowering.
I’m frightened because I have Alzheimer’s. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I don’t have any idea how I will feel when I can’t remember who I am or what I’m doing and my thoughts are confused and my emotions in turmoil.
Did you wonder what your friends and family would do when you were taken away? Would they know how painful it was for you? How could they know? Would they try to help you but find they could do nothing to change the course of what was to come? Would they be fearful for their own safety? Would some of them abandon you?
BALTIMORE -- At the Seventh National Symposium on Catholicism and Homosexuality, retired Australian Bishop Geoffrey Robinson called Friday for "a new study of everything to do with sexuality" -- a kind of study that he predicted "would have a profound influence on church teaching concerning all sexual relationships, both heterosexual and homosexual."
Commentary
GARNER, N.C. -- In the predawn hours of Jan. 23, my wife, Mary Rider, and I roused our four youngest children out of bed to meet a bus that would take us to Washington, D.C., for the March of Life, the annual event that calls for an end to abortion. Two of our other daughters made the same trip with their Catholic high school in Raleigh, Cardinal Gibbons High School.
The trip marked our third family trip to the nation's capital in less than a month. During a Holy Innocents retreat in the days after Christmas, two of my daughters, Veronica, 15, and Annie, 11, joined a die-in in front of the White House to protest U.S. drone attacks on civilians. After a cardboard drone facsimile touched them on the head, my daughters fell to the ground on Pennsylvania Avenue to play dead with others.
On Jan. 11, following another trip (this time on a biodiesel bus with a composting toilet), my family marched from the White House to the U.S. Supreme Court to protest the 10th anniversary of the opening of the prison on Guantanamo Bay, where scores of detainees have been tortured, held indefinitely and denied due process.
OMAHA, Neb. -- It started in 1917 with a rented house, five boys who needed a home in Omaha and a Catholic priest determined to help troubled and abandoned youths throughout the city.
Now, Boys Town helps more than 1.6 million people each year through its main campus of group homes, churches, a grade school and high school, post office and bank, as well as a national research hospital in Omaha, a national hotline, and other services and locations around the country.
LENT
Doctors diagnosed Jane McAllister with Alzheimer’s disease eight years ago. Alzheimer’s is the sixth-leading cause of death in the U.S. It cannot be prevented or cured, its course as inexorable as the events leading to the passion and death of Jesus. Some 15 million Alzheimer’s caregivers provide 17 billion hours of unpaid, loving care each year. It is not uncommon for patients and caregivers to wonder: Where is resurrection in a disease that takes away our very selves?
COLUMN
"Don't be defeatist, dear; it's very middle-class."
If you recognize this quote, you're probably a fan -- make that a fanatic -- of the PBS series "Downton Abbey." There are millions of us spanning several continents, making the Masterpiece Theater mini-series that just finished its second season a veritable pop culture phenomenon.
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