Religion Dispatches
…officiants, or “friars,” conduct services including baptisms, funerals and free weddings. These communal actions appeal to the universal need for ritual and community. Some approved friars are religious, including seminary students and preachers. Also, like many churches, the UCB give a percentage of their budget to charitable causes aligned with their beliefs, though they remain volunteer based with no paid church staff. For those who compare the…
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…e nature of the human body. 10. Yoga “UN-Bound” In his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 27, 2014, Narendra Modi called for June 21 to serve as International Yoga Day. Nearly two hundred countries, including the United States, Canada, and China, expressed their support for the proposition, and, on December 11, 2014, the General Assembly approved by consensus a resolution establishing June 21 as International Day of Y…
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…tury, Pope Leo XIII expressed ambivalence about the Catholic Church in the United States. Much of what the man sometimes called “the first modern pope” had to say amounted to nodding approval (“That your Republic is progressing and developing by giant strides is patent to all…”), which at times seemed to take credit for the success it praised. In a rhetorical flourish, the pope even laid claim to the nation’s neonatal survival: “When America was,…
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…t on the treatment of stress, chronic pain, and other health issues in the United States. In 2007, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, one of the National Institutes of Health, found that more than 20 million Americans had used meditation techniques derived from Buddhist or Hindu traditions for various health reasons in the previous twelve months. Furthermore, in a USA Today article published this past summer, Jon Kabat…
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…of the others. The new administration has launched aggressive attacks on a free and fair press, freedom of speech, and the right of the citizenry to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances. One could even argue that he’s weakened the free expression of religion (or lack thereof), particularly as it refers to contraception, LGBT rights, and any non-Christian faith practices. Take the freedom of the press and the r…
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…re, he argues, nothing is sacred): No ideas, religious or otherwise, get a free pass. The notion that some idea or concept is beyond question or attack is anathema to the entire scientific undertaking. This commitment to open questioning is deeply tied to the fact that science is an atheistic enterprise. Krauss is right to draw the connection between science and the concept of a secular public square. Both emerged around the same period in history…
Read More…a dormitory and besides going to class and a small part time job, I was a free bird. In Ramadan a free bird, flies high on the rituals of the month. I stood for 20 units or tarawih every night that I was fasting. Like the first time reading through the Qu’ran in Arabic on my own this was exhilarating. Somewhere around 12 or 14 units, I lost track of everything outside of the recitation and the ritual performance—the zone. It was even more intense…
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…a. The Hitching Post offers three venues for the wedding: a chapel, mostly free of religious symbols but adorned with flowers and foliage; a “Western room,” with cowboy-boot-and-gun decor; and a “Victorian Sitting Room,” which also has flowers and foliage. The ministers will also perform weddings at ski resorts and outdoor locations. They have performed weddings on boats, on horseback, on roller coasters, and in hot air balloons. None of this seem…
Read More…or Mormon anti-state conservatism is the idea that these programs mitigate freedom of choice. Mormon theology holds that the purpose of human existence is the free exercise of human agency—the ability to choose—so that men and women can learn by experience and prepare themselves to share in the glory of God. Of course, this emphasis on agency never hindered the nineteenth-century Mormon practices of economic communitarianism. But early twentieth-c…
Read More…the Republic included “as he died to make men holy let us die to make men free,” when the more common version these days calls on us to “live to make men free.” Yet even with regard to the way military force has been central to what it means to be American, the president presented a new narrative, asserting that “peace and lasting security do not mean we are in a state of perpetual war.” One of the most important ways in which the tea party and…
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