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Cafeteria Cockroaches and Synagogue-State Relations in Israel

…funerals, or certify a restaurant as kosher. At present there are a small number of Conservative and Reform Rabbis in Israel, but they receive no funds or recognition from the state. What they do receive is a heavy dose of contempt from the official Rabbinate. When non-Orthodox Rabbis are referred to in Orthodox publications their title is given in transliterated form, the English word “Rabbi,” not the Hebrew word “Rav.” Women Rabbis come in for

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Wesolowski Sexual Abuse Case a New Approach or Same Old Same Old?

…r in the style to which Wesolowski became accustomed. Multiply that by the number of countries where the Vatican has diplomatic relations. I doubt these diplomatic men cook their own meals or wash their own cassocks, no matter how frugal Pope Francis may be. So somebody pays a lot of money to keep this genteel charade in motion. That “somebody” is rank and file Catholics who have little if any say about where their weekly contributions go. Spoiler…

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Trump’s Pathological Devotion to Border Walls Isn’t Political, It’s Theological

…ted 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 a brief lull in the digital noise when an official government action was announced from France: the state of emergency declared by President F…

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Why the Church is Struggling to Hold Onto Millennial Catholics

…tholic faith influences her work. Partially as a response to the dwindling number of young Catholics, the campus ministry group FOCUS (Fellowship of Catholic University Students), similarly to Opus Dei, sends missionaries – many of whom are recent college graduates themselves — out to secular college campuses, where they run bible studies and other group activities. A version of the FOCUS handbook on Wikileaks emphasizes adherence to church teachi…

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Religion Round-Up: What’s Going on in Religion Around the World

…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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To Be Queer, Gifted, and Black: A Conversation with Theologian Pamela Lightsey

…r movement? The Black Lives Matter movement as I have experienced it has a number of queer black women on the ground doing the work. It also has trans women and trans men on the ground doing the work. They are part of the leadership. As you know the Black Lives Matter movement is a “leaderful” movement, and that is to say that not one or two persons are in charge of any action but that the movement itself very beautifully recognizes and utilizes t…

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Elephant Orphans and Ecological Spiritualities: An Earth Day Reflection

…ysteries of these creatures. I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. A large number of the “spiritual but not religious” crowd in the West are self-proclaimed ecologists or naturalists. A large number of atheists and agnostics are deeply passionate about ecological ethics, or how we might be more “in tune” with nature. Culturally, they become fascinated in the personalities of cats and cat videos, the companionship of dogs who offer a kind of faithf…

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Atheists Ignore Islamophobia at their Peril

…criticism can easily devolve into unthinking prejudice. I can think of any number of examples from atheist conferences I’ve attended, such as the time I watched with dismay as attendees shouted “show us some ankle” at women wearing burkas for a satirical musical performance, or when a group of fundamentalist Muslim protesters was encircled by a crowd of hundreds of atheist conference attendees shouting things like “go back to the Middle East, you…

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The Problem with AMC’s Sci-Fi Hit Humans

…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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