Religion Dispatches
…gree with them is over what we find when we look, and over needing to look using all of the wonderful and rich secular tools at our disposal. Anything you had to leave out? I did not discuss the political tasks of secularists in today’s America—the need to “out” ourselves in order to form a significant political force. I’ve been doing this since, in USA Today, in The Nation, in other articles and interviews. I’ve just completed an op-ed to Preside…
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…ne T. Jackson and other prosperity gospel preachers just as much as he was using them. Maybe more. Butler started her close with this alarming kicker: It is also worth mentioning that this recent black church visit was likely the suggestion of [former Celebrity Apprentice contestant Omarosa] Manigault, who is savvy enough to know that sending Trump to a social justice-oriented black church is out of the question. By aligning with black prosperity…
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…ancestry generations ago, a Jewish spouse, Jewish friends etc. In terms of numbers, Jews by religion or no religion make up 2.2% of the U.S. population, but if you add “People with a Jewish affinity” it rises to 2.7%, so that this category of people who are not considered Jews by the Jewish community but identify as Jews is nearly 25% of the Jews by religion or no religion, those we conventionally call “Jews.” The fact that there are so many Ameri…
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…administration and the mandate. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of white Catholics who said the Obama administration was “unfriendly to religion” more than doubled from 17 percent to 36 percent between 2009 and 2014. And starting around 2012, white Catholics broke for the GOP by historic margins. It’s also worth noting, as Michael Sean Winters has, that this occurred around the time the administrative staff of the bishops’ confer…
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…blimated affair, often done behind closed doors and incentivized by free housing, education, food, clean water, and healthcare. Even during the Mughal era, violence was not the most common means of converting Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains to Islam. Instead, it was the jizya, the tax levied on non-Muslims, that over time won the most converts, and those conversions happened across caste lines. The re-introduction of Christianity by the Portuguese to…
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…basal ganglia, and other brain regions have been proposed to accomplish a number of specific functions. Imagine, for example, working intently on some task until you notice that your stomach is rumbling and that the daylight has shifted. You think back to when you last ate, gauge how long you’ve been working, and give yourself five minutes to finish up before having a light snack, so as not to ruin your dinner. An MRI scan of this thought proces…
Read More…ring who it is being directed to and where it is apparently originating. A number of Palestinians are Christians, and that Christianity is of course traced back to the time of Jesus himself. The Palestinian weekend is Friday and Sunday. In addition to being the world’s most annoying and dissatisfying weekend schedule (there should be an award for that, or maybe financial compensation), the days reflect the primary religious affiliations of Palesti…
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…be live-streamed, starting Wednesday, June 15). The bishops will take up a number of issues, from the revised liturgy to assisted suicide, but their conversations are sure to be dominated by an issue that has been dogging them since the mid-1980s: sexually abusive priests and the bishops who enabled them. Ten years after Cardinal Bernard Law became the poster bishop for failed religious leadership, new revelations of episcopal misfeasance threaten…
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…udied, and at least 12 were formally approved as of 2008—according to most numbers (although even a simple count of “official” sites is hard to obtain), Our Lady of Good Help is the 13th. Pope Benedict XVI recently called for more moderation in approving such sites, but any new regulations did not fall into place in time to stop Bishop Ricken from pushing Adele Brise into the international spotlight. Benedict probably doesn’t have to worry about A…
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…ns of the brain that remain unactivated in the rest of us. There are any number of weird implications and outright contradictions in these sorts of studies. The first is this: do the authors of these studies believe that religious belief or practice has the power to effect the size of the human brain? If so, that would seem to grant an astonishing power to religion to effect real world, and very nearly miraculous changes. Or perhaps the claim i…
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