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In a frank interview with the Wall Street Journal last year, Cardinal Timothy Dolan conceded that the post-Vatican II Church in America has “gotten gun-shy” on hot-button moral issues. The Church’s encyclical on artificial birth control, Humanae Vitae, “brought such a tsunami of dissent, departure, disapproval of the Church, that I think most of us—and I’m using the first-person plural intentionally, including myself—kind of subconsciously said, ‘Whoa. We’d better never talk about that, because it’s just too hot to handle.’” The soft-pedaling started, he said, “when the whole world seemed to be caving in, and where Catholics in general got...

Tarik Shah is a formidable jazz bassist who has recorded with a number of luminaries, including Pharoah Sanders and Abbey Lincoln. He is also prisoner number 53145-054 at the medium security Federal Correction Institution in Petersburg, Virginia, where he is serving a fifteen-year sentence for plotting to provide combat training to al-Qaeda jihadists. His sad and tragic case points up again lingering questions about Islamic moderation that have never been answered. In 2004, Shah made the acquaintance of a man he thought was an al-Qaeda member, but who was actually an FBI informant. Shah, a martial arts expert as...

About one in four Americans suspect that President Barack Obama might be the antichrist, more than a third believe that global warming is a hoax and more than half suspect that a secretive global elite is trying to set up a New World Order, according to a poll released on Tuesday.

This is our heritage. This is what they want us to toss into the garbage.

Autumn Carter, a Mansfield, Ohio girl, was raped and killed in 1998. She was six-months old (that’s right). Her convicted killer, Steven Smith, has a May 1 date with the executioner. Yesterday, he appeared before the Ohio Parole Board, where he pleaded for mercy. Smith, 31 years old at the time he took baby Autumn’s life, has not repented his evil. He says his life should be spared because he really didn’t mean to kill the infant. He just wanted to have sex with her. The convicted killer’s public defenders, Joseph Wilhelm and Tyson Fleming, had his back yesterday at...

Just last year, Bob Casey ran for re-election as a pro-marriage senator. Now, the Catholic senator from Pennsylvania, has "evolved" on the issue and is now in line with his party by declaring he's pro-gay marriage . Wonder if this has anything to do with recent polls shifting towards gay marriage. This is hardly stunning coming from Casey who swore all over the state that he was a devout Catholic and pro-life like his father, the late Governor Bob Casey. The "pro-life" Casey has repeatedly betrayed the unborn both with his vote for Obamacare and repeated votes to fund Planned...

MOSCOW, April 2 (RIA Novosti) - A court in south Russia has banned as “extremist” a book entitled “How to Accept Islam,” officials said on Tuesday. The Krasnoyarsk district court ordered all copies of the book to be confiscated and destroyed. Investigators, citing linguistic experts, said the book, by Muhammad Suleiman Ashkara, encouraged religious hatred. The court said the book was discovered during a May 2011 raid at the Krasnoyarsk home of a man suspected of links to an extremist Islamic organization.

A respected pro-family organization announced a boycott of Starbucks coffee. The group, which supports legal protection for traditional marriage, launched the "Dump Starbucks" campaign after a national board meeting in which the Seattle-based coffee company mentioned support for same-sex marriage as a core value of the company. Some Christians are wondering whether we ought to join in the boycott. I say no. It's not that I'm saying a boycott in and of itself is always evil or wrong. It's just that, in this case (and in many like it) a boycott exposes us to all of our worst tendencies. Christians...

I’ve been out of pocket, so I missed most of the hullabaloo about Reverend Luis León’s indefensible Easter sermon at St. John’s Episcopal Church in front of the Obama family. Among his comments he said the “religious Right” wants “blacks to be back in the back of the bus, for women to be back in the kitchen, for gays to be in the closet, and for immigrants to be on their side of the border.” Once you get beyond the nasty, clichéd and divisive insinuations about conservatives being racists and the basic inappropriateness of the whole spectacle, it seems to...

I offer the single most politically incorrect statement a modern American — indeed a modern Westerner, period — can make: I look first to the Bible for moral guidance and for wisdom. I say this even though I am not a Christian (I am a Jew, and a non-Orthodox one at that). And I say this even though I attended an Ivy League graduate school (Columbia), where I learned nothing about the Bible except that it was irrelevant, outdated, and frequently immoral. I say this because there is nothing — not any other work, religious or secular, or body of...

It came on Good Friday, a gift from God and U.S District Judge Deborah Batts. The lawsuit by American Atheists seeking to ban the cross found at Ground Zero from being displayed in a museum has been tossed out, and the cross will be permitted to stay. The fact that this ruling came on the holiest week of the year for Christians is a delicious irony, one that I can bask in for months, possibly even years to come. I thank God for the sensibility of Judge Batts. Those fun-loving folks over at American Atheists – who despise any and...

A crowd of at least 30 Muslims hurled rocks at Jews touring the Temple Mount on the Passover holiday. Israel National News reported, via Religion of Peace: Once again, extremist Muslims tried but failed to prevent Jews from accessing the holiest site in the Jewish faith, with the threat of attacks. Dozens of Arab teens hurled rocks Sunday morning at groups of Jews who were touring the Temple Mount. The site was open on the eve of the final day of the Passover holiday in the morning from 7:30 a.m to 11:00 a.m and scheduled to reopen from 1:00 p.m....

It's amazing how many commentators seem fixated on judging religious institutions through poll questions, but Cardinal Timothy Dolan pointed out the obvious in his Easter appearance on ABC's This Week. George Stephanopoulos challenged Dolan about a recent poll of Catholics, which showed that 60% felt that the church had fallen out of touch with the views of Catholics in the US. Dolan reminded viewers that the purpose of the faith isn't to change teachings based on polls — and that means that sometimes people will find the church "out of touch":CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO During an interview for...

When Margaret Thatcher negotiated with Communists about human rights, she had a self-imposed rule. It was to deliver the same message in private as in public. That was, and is, unusual. Politicians prefer bold and indignant speeches at home to bruising confrontations with foreign leaders face to face. But you have to do it. The reason is simple. It is because, whatever someone's ideology, he will not take you seriously as a human being if he thinks you don't really care about the causes you espouse. When the Soviet leaders understood that Ronald Reagan and Mrs Thatcher were deadly serious...

The Porteño Pope and That Hideous StrengthPosted By Charles A. Coulombe On March 23, 2013 @ 1:42 pm In Articles,Biography,Current Issues in the Church,History | 8 Comments For this great Argentine [Peron] Who worked tirelessly, That there should rule in the people love and equality. — Hugo del Carril, Marcha PeronistaThe shadow of that hyddeous strength, sax myle and more it is of length — David Lyndsay, The MonarcheThe election of Pope Francis, the first ever Argentine Pope, has left commentators and normal people alike scratching their heads, desperately trying to understand what the new Pontificate may mean and what...

President Obama was Monday's KVML "Newsmaker of the Day". Here are his words: "Hi, everybody. For millions of Americans, this is a special and sacred time of year. This week, Jewish families gathered around the Seder table, commemorating the Exodus from Egypt and the triumph of faith over oppression. And this weekend, Michelle, Malia, Sasha and I will join Christians around the world to celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and the hopeful promise of Easter. In the midst of all of our busy and noisy lives, these holy days afford us the precious opportunity to slow down and spend...

I realize that my heading is sensational, shocking, and critics will say it is silly, but even if that is true, that would not make it imponderable, improbable, or impossible. Other nations have destroyed themselves by flaunting their wicked behavior in the face of God. Many Americans are experts at flaunting even as they profess motives of love, equality and justice. I suggest their motive is fear: fear of being laughed at; fear of being ostracized; fear of inadequate ability to defend the biblical position. So, it’s easier, and more popular, to go with the flow–even if it’s over Niagara....

Culture challenge of the week: Easter makeoverOn Easter Monday, the White House will host its annual Easter Egg Roll. Before you applaud the Obamas for maintaining the traditional celebration, consider how things have changed. This year’s theme (Why does Easter Monday demand a “theme” apart from Easter itself?) is “Be Healthy, Be Active, Be You!” Yes, that’s right. The Egg Roll, an event that has been around for 135 years, acknowledging Easter’s importance in the cultural and religious lives of our people, has been reduced to a physical fitness promotion, with Michelle Obama as the Richard Simmons-style cheerleader. This year’s...

The internet is alight today with stories of faith, confections, and one very famous egg roll, but the biggest web destination of them all has opted to honor a leftist labor activist instead of the Easter holiday. Several times per year, and sometimes per month, internet search behemoth Google shakes things up on its incredibly high-traffic homepage by changing its logo to celebrate a memorable day in history like a famous person’s birthday or world-changing event.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan acknowledged on Sunday that there was still much to do to make the church welcoming to gay and lesbian Catholics. "We gotta do better to see that our defense of marriage is not reduced to an attack on gay people. And I admit, we haven't been too good at that. We try our darndest to make sure we're not an anti-anybody," he said in an interview to be aired Sunday on ABC's "This Week.". But the archbishop of New York said he wasn't sure how that outreach might work. "I don't know. We're still trying. We're trying...