Twitter Lights Up After Supremes' Hobby Lobby Decision: A Selection of Noteworthy Reactions

The Twitterverse is, of course, alive with tweets since the Supremes' (entirely expected and still  abominable) Hobby Lobby decision this morning. Here are some among many tweets I've found worthwhile:

The Vatican Document on the Pastoral Challenges of Family: Problematic Framing of Its "Communication" of "the Gospel of the Family"

Suppose you are, God forbid, in a difficult spot with your spouse of many years, and you both agree to resort to couples counseling to try to sort out your problems. You're convinced that he doesn't listen. He's certain that he's a very skilled listener. This presents a serious problem for both of you, this breakdown in communication, with the obstinate certainty of one of you that he listens and listens well, and your strong sense that you're, in fact, not really being heard at all.

Snippets from Last Week's News: Religion, Men, Women, Gay Folks, and Marriage

A threading together of snippets from last week's news and news commentary (and I'll leave it to you to decide where the threads run and what's being pieced together with these snippets):

More on Controversy about Baptizing Children of Same-Sex Couples: David Gibson and Bob Shine

And speaking of definitions of family and insider-outsider lines that seek to make some families more significant, normative, meaningful, or "traditional" than others, I now see that, the day before I wrote about this topic, David Gibson had published an article at the Religion News Service website about the discussion in the Catholic diocese of Madison, Wisconsin, re: baptizing children of same-sex couples. Gibson's article asks whether this issue of baptizing children of gay couples is going to become a new battleground issue in the Catholic church.

"Traditional" Family and the Bible: Snapshots from Recent Discussions of the Topic

Matthew 12: 46-48

In her recent book, How the West Really Lost God, Mary Eberstadt argues that the decline of the traditional family has led to the secularization of the West, rather than vice versa as many sociological theories propose. Robert Hunt disagrees.

Cooking to Save the Planet: Lentil Soup

Lentils first came to my attention when I went to college in New Orleans and stayed to work there a number of years, returning after I finished graduate studies to take a teaching job. My family ate (and relished) many pulses as I was growing up, including pinto or navy beans, which were both cooked with chunks of ham and then served (with their delicious, rich pot liquor) over cornbread — a recurring meal that my parents associated with their Depression-era childhoods, but which we all liked very much, especially when the beans appeared on the table with a bowl of my mother's tart-sweet, hot (from chopped jalapeños) chow-chow, redolent of the mixture of spices used to produce this end-of-garden pickled relish.

Religion and the Struggle for Rights for Women and Gay Folks Today: Fred Clark on the Significance of the Backdrop — The Struggle for Rights of People of Color

I've repeatedly noted here my frustration that many of those commenting on civil rights issues today, particularly within the academic and journalistic commentariat of my own Catholic community in the U.S., seem lamentably ill-informed about the history of slavery in the U.S. and how religion was used for many centuries to justify slavery and then to defend the legal segregation of the races up into the 1960s. For instance, back in 2011, I took issue with the assertion of Eduardo Moisés Peñalver (a Commonweal contributor whose work I respect) that