Word: humanism
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...college student because of the church, although I'm the first to acknowledge that my church, like most churches, is capable of sublime holiness, a la Mother Teresa. I converted to a religion that I felt more meaningfully engaged my spirituality because it more meaningfully engaged my humanity - and, as strange as this sounds to my atheist friends, because it more meaningfully engaged my reason, not just my senses (although I'm as much a sucker for Palestrina and Michelangelo as anyone else). What gets lost amid the Catholic Church's reputation for obscurantism is the fact that the Catholic...
...books like Faithful Dissenters, by Robert McClory, which chronicle how such independent souls have not only questioned the church but helped save it from the kind of glaring errors - like its acceptance of slavery, a stance that Pope Leo XIII finally ended in 1888 - that underscore what a human and fallible institution the church...
...church that insists that only it can be trusted in the end to exercise reason on moral questions - don't try theology at home, the Vatican always seems to tell us - because it inevitably invites the laity to come to its own informed and conscientious conclusions about when human life begins or whether women should be priests. Vatican II, the modernizing church council of the 1960s, emboldened that lay assertiveness among U.S. Catholics as never before; the pedophile tragedy has made the laity's self-reliant spirit irradicable...
None of which, however, means that U.S. Catholics don't want the Church. We do. Like everyone else, Catholics fall away from God on a regular basis and become pretty dismal human beings; and we benefit from the spiritual and moral guidance of priests and nuns, especially the example so many of them set as aids to the poor. We may not impart the church's ban on premarital sex to our children, but we're glad the church is there to help us teach our kids that sex should be shared in a context of love, respect and responsibility...
...bloody civil war for 44 years. Uribe claims that data on Reyes' laptop computer reveals ties between the FARC and Ecuadorian Security Minister Gustavo Larrea. Correa vehemently denies it, insisting his military has removed FARC camps inside Ecuador and that Colombia - whose own military is often accused by human rights groups of killing innocent civilians in its hunt for FARC rebels - is being too lax about policing its own side of the border and preventing the rebels from seeping into his country...