Religion Dispatches
…e deadliest peacetime attack on America by a single gunman. Since an equal number of Virginia Tech students and American-born Muslims have gone on killing sprees, Goldberg should clearly be asking to investigate Virginia Tech’s mental health support structures. Or perhaps, using Goldberg’s logic, we should investigate whether East Asian men have a propensity to mass murder, given the ethnicity both of the Virginia Tech and Binghamton shooters. For…
Read More…learning from our colleagues and exploring these complex histories over a number of years, we have found that religious liberty is not a single, stable principle existing outside of history, as it is often depicted (particularly in policy circles in North America and Europe and by many academics invested in promoting religious freedom). It is, rather, an inescapably context-bound, polyvalent concept unfolding within divergent histories in differi…
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…, there’s a whopper of a story here, I thought; one that went back quite a number of years and that encompassed matters of faith and ritual practice, material culture and daily life as well as the law. I then spent a number of years tracking down, unearthing and interpreting the many iterations of the ancient biblical passages that turned out, much to my surprise and delight, to be just about everywhere in the United States of the late 19th and ea…
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…ief revisiting here. A Missouri state program offered grants for a limited number of nonprofit schools and daycares to purchase rubber playground surfaces made from recycled tires. Prospective grantees were evaluated and selected based on a number of factors, including poverty level of the surrounding area and their willingness to generate media exposure for Missouri. In 2012, Trinity Lutheran, a Missouri Synod congregation, applied for the grant…
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…inant models of analysis: number crunching and psychology. Greenspan was a number cruncher, says Brooks, and unfortunately, human psychology caught up with him. Greenspan saw real estate values continuing to soar with no end in sight and allowed himself to be persuaded that they would never stop rising, and certainly would never fall. So he never had to think about petty psychological realities, like a crisis of confidence, never mind an actual pa…
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…lative to other companies in the pharmaceutical sector. But it has taken a number of decisive actions to reduce its risk “exposure” regarding greenhouse gases. Abbott has taken for example, a “Climate Responsible Energy Policy” that includes a five year plan for reducing the emission of CO2, our principal greenhouse gas. Among other things they are developing a carbon-neutral vehicle fleet: it is the first and only Fortune 500 company to commit to…
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…ldless. LEADING WHILE FEMALE Elaine Howard Ecklund: Even with an increased number of women working in the sociology of religion, there aren’t many women who are named chairs in universities. The number of women in the sociology of religion who hold tenure track jobs, earn tenure, get published, and get cited is not changing as fast as we would expect, giving that we are seeing gender parity in terms of who earns a graduate degree. There are conver…
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…our own motives and aspiring to reduce harm and suffering for the greatest number of those at risk.” Ven. Thanissaro Bhikkhu, another notable teacher and translator in the Theravada tradition, disagreed vehemently with Bhikkhu Bodhi’s position, writing a lengthy letter to Inquiring Mind in which he outlined various objections. “The common view—that murderous force is an unfortunate but necessary last resort—is what has caused so much money, time a…
Read More…dominant evangelical orientation of the black church coupled with a large number of Catholic Latino voters may just provide the support Prop 8 needs—it has been said, “politics makes for strange bedfellows.” Yet I am hopeful that enough minority voters will view this amendment for what it is, state-sanctioned discrimination and a bible-based prohibition against exogamy, which is reminiscent of previous state bans on interracial marriage that defi…
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…red with anti-critical race theory laws being passed for K-12 schools in a number of Republican states and further bills aimed at higher education proposed. What many will perhaps find more surprising is that the rhetoric being used by Campus Reform and their ilk is far from new to me or fellow researchers working on racial justice in American Buddhism. Rather it echoes some of the white Buddhist backlash to racial justice work. A number of white…
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