Religion Dispatches
…r on a realistic understanding of the complex make-up and nature of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state—including its many internal challenges. What I found most fascinating, however, were the categories “People of Jewish background” and “People with a Jewish affinity.” The first includes those “who have a Jewish parent or were raised Jewish but identify with a religion other than Judaism.” In contrast, “People with a Jewish affinity” are thos…
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…s voters in Iowa, Bloomberg News reports, Trump is considered stronger on managing the economy, illegal immigration, and the deficit while Cruz is stronger on leadership and persuasiveness to conservative evangelicals. But their common savior appeal tells us a great deal about the state of the nation. Regardless of the final choice of candidate, that savior-hungry state is what the next president and congress face. It’s tells us where America is h…
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…eed, the so-called ghar wapsi (“homecoming or conversion”) effort has rung alarm bells among observers, stoking fears that the right-of-center government of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi (a self-described Hindu nationalist), are seeking to undermine post-independence India’s secular ideals. It has drawn so much attention, in fact, that it prompted President Obama to issue a not-so-subtle rebuke to Modi’s government fo…
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…titution that allies itself too closely with any given political party, a hazard that’s pronounced in the age of Trump, as the raw racial animus at his core becomes impossible to ignore for even those who were determined to avert their gaze. But that danger is especially acute for religious institutions, which face a special moral hazard in becoming too closely identified with a specific party. And, as political scientist Timothy Byrnes writes in…
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…Every so often, economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz crunches Google search data for the New York Times and comes up with some fun statistics about, say, the anxieties of pregnant women (“can pregnant women eat shrimp?” is a popular search query in the US) or the ratio of heart-related to penis-related searches (67:100 for those keeping score). This Sunday, Stephens-Davidowitz turned his attention to God. Some of the patterns he documents are predic…
Read More…sly healed by touching the garment of the latest faith healer and saying “Baaay-bee!” Religion can also motivate people to kill others like abortion doctors, gays and lesbians, and transgender people all in the name of their god. The single greatest motivator for these 98 subjects however most certainly was a fear-based one. In short, they were all living under the threat of hell. The thought of eternal damnation—a true, fiery pit where you suffe…
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…idences the latter’s piety. Ironically, it was Columba’s grandfather, the pagan king Nial, who was responsible for Patrick’s kidnapping, the event which began the saint’s ministry in Ireland. Now, both Patrick and Columba are among the dozen canonized Disciples of Ireland, though beyond even that honorific, both are remembered as exemplars of “Celtic Christianity,” a version of the faith drawn towards the natural, the mystical, the eternal. Medita…
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…the one thing that they got right in this case. The U.S. has on the books a number of valuable laws against discrimination in the workplace, and all organizations (businesses, nonprofits, schools, governments) are expected to abide by these laws. Except religions, or so it now seems. According to the Tabor ruling, religious groups get a pass on the law when it comes to employees who are considered “ministerial.” The right to the free exercise of…
Read More…ation or function of the brain, it must not be real. The article points to a number of ways neuropsychology has been overinterpreted and oversold. Rosenbaum addresses the fetishizing of fMRI images, the ideology that conflates causation and correlation, and the shifting semantics — evil recast as “non-empathy” by one esteemed psychologist (echoing, interestingly, the traditional Christian understanding of evil as a privation). But it’s the image o…
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…’s success as an attraction is partially due to its pop cultural currency: a 1943 film starring Jennifer Jones, Song of Bernadette, made the saint a star in the English-speaking world. But it also has a particular theological significance: the specific wording of Bernadette’s 1858 conversations with the Virgin conveniently reinforced Pope Pius IX’s 1854 declaration of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Adele Brise’s apparition shares simil…
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