Religion Dispatches
…e armed forces. With this rise of dharma practitioners in the services has come a need for Buddhist chaplains, and several have been commissioned in the last fifteen years. (Two of them, the Army’s Somya Malasri and the Navy’s Aroon Seeda, were among the attendees at the White House gathering.) Bosco notes, however, that many Buddhists in the U.S. military have retreated to online communities due to the prevailing support for nonviolence among Ame…
Read More
…e problems faced by their non-tenured colleagues. But as the gig economy becomes normalized and colleges adapt a merciless corporate model at the expense of both students and faculty, unions can still offer protections that would not otherwise exist. And for Catholic colleges making every effort to prevent contingent faculty from unionizing, Pope Francis has some strong words of advice. In 2013, he told a group of unemployed Italians that when it…
Read More
…ral bishops without papal approval, and he and the new SSPX bishops were excommunicated. This excommunication was in place until after Lefebvre’s death in 1991. But it did not stop the SSPX from expanding, training more priests, ministering to more parishes, and maintaining its stance on Vatican II and the Mass. Father Paul Vassal is the Prior of the Post Falls community, and he stresses that the SSPX is primarily a priestly order, and the fathers…
Read More
…y wins men 32-30, but Clinton romps among women, 51-22. The most important numbers may be still to come, however. PRRI looks to be releasing new information on the Catholic vote on Halloween, a number which often closely tracks the final total of overall voters. It’s also a number that varies quite a bit by the racial breakdown. While Trump wins white Catholics 48-41, he gets absolutely crushed among Hispanics, 84-12. A few back-of-the-envelope ca…
Read More
…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…
Read More
…%). When Coney Barrett was nominated in September of 2020, Trump’s polling numbers among white evangelicals had dipped to a low of 55% in August 2020. However, once her nomination was made public that number rose to the normal average of 71%. Coney Barrett’s record on reproductive rights was a central issue in her confirmation hearings, as Anna North points out at Vox: Barrett, a Catholic and member of the religious group People of Praise, has als…
Read More
…delights in surfacing little-known factoids. These include the remarkable number of commercial hucksters who were preachers or else preachers’ kids (e.g., Richard Bolles of What Color is Your Parachute? fame—a former Episcopal priest) and the equally remarkable number of notable preachers who had strong commercial instincts and/or commercial roots (ranging from 18th-century superstar evangelist George Whitefield to 19th-century revivalist giant C…
Read More…who accept their sexuality but live in such a way to honor their religious commitments then why interview a guy who promises that gays can change? This is complicated. Wyler’s stated reason for wanting to change was to fit in better with his Mormon faith (Spiegel and Schumacher-Matos incorrectly identifies Wyler as “evangelical Christian”). However, the “identity therapy” (more completely sexual identity therapy) does not promote change of orienta…
Read More
…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…
Read More
…bellum, the 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 tho…
Read More