Religion Dispatches
…ecific audience in mind? Just people who like good stories. I think like many writers you want to appeal to as many people as possible. I was no different. However, my intention in writing the book was never to change people’s minds or make them believers. I wasn’t trying to change the minds of skeptics. What I wanted to do was to tell my story and get people to think about some of the things I wrote about: Is there more to life than what we can s…
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…sticism. Religion News Service regrets the inaccuracy.” Well, okay. Take a number if you’d like to complain about my own writerly inaccuracies. Still, the trouble with the piece goes beyond an inaccurate (though indisputably grabby) headline. Reporter Kimberly Winston is careful to point out that the Pew report authors have noted “that [the religiously unaffiliated] are by no means homogeneous.” She goes on to highlight Pew researchers’ noting of…
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…lenial South if they want to stick around. * I’m using data from The ARDA, which break down membership by state, but which apparently don’t match the SBC’s self-reported numbers. If anyone from the convention has state-level data they want to send me, I’ll gladly update the analysis….
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…low creatures does us any good. Standing here, I recall a portion of the Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina’s satirical essay about Western writers, “How to Write About Africa.” He mocks the common sketch of elephants: “Elephants are caring, and are good feminists or dignified patriarchs. So are gorillas. Never, ever say anything negative about an elephant or a gorilla. Elephants may attack people’s property, destroy their crops, and even kill them…
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…human form isn’t always best for the job. Take, for example, the synth telephone operator. Why create a physical robot for this job which has to receive audio through a wired earpiece and then respond via speaker into a microphone? Couldn’t synth software do the trick without complex parts that mimic the functions of ears and a mouth? Furthermore, wouldn’t it make better economic sense to distribute artificial intelligence across multiple hardware…
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…ice says. In her view, however, abortion is a sin. “I do not believe that anyone has a right to take a life. Period. And I think it goes against the nature of what midwifery is.” A number of articles have recently cropped up reckoning with the relative merits of home and hospital births. The New York Times Magazine ran a piece on home birth trailblazer Ina May Gaskin, for example, while The Atlantic focused on low-tech births, and The Daily Beast’…
Read More…are, according to Pew, surprisingly high. Moreover, they represent a large number of people, “nearly equal the estimated number of religiously affiliated adults in the United States” Accordingly, the 1-plus % of the Chinese population that identifies itself as Muslim equals some 20.3 million people—a population almost as large as Saudi Arabia’s. (More to the point, as one of China’s ethnic minorities, Muslims are not bound to the one-child per fam…
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…re obscene military-grade automatic types, he could have only carried so many bullets with him. Americans knew how to watch the number of reported casualties go up, but we lost our collective minds when we watched the number of confirmed active shooters in Paris go up. The images coming out of Paris in the immediate term were of a city devoured by chaos and fear rather than the stillness of carnage, more terrifying for their uncertainty. There was…
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…of Synagogue–State relations in Israel, the Orthodox rabbinate controls many areas of life; with the Kashrut laws being only the most obvious. In fact, the most contentious area is not food, but that of ‘personal status’ (laws of marriage and divorce) controlled by the Israeli Rabbinate whose functionaries are paid with taxpayer funds. The Rabbis of other Jewish denominations—Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, Jewish Renewal—are not recogni…
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…all those who, free themselves, speak out in our support. There are a vast number, I know. I know that a huge number of Orthodox people are standing up for us. They are praying for us outside the courtroom, for the members of Pussy Riot who are incarcerated. We’ve seen the little booklets Orthodox people are handing out with prayers for those in prison. This shows that there isn’t a unified social group of Orthodox believers as the prosecution is…
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