Religion Dispatches
…fetimes. A second study attempted to test unconscious beliefs by having 71 New Zealand undergraduates rapidly categorize a series of 20 nouns as “real” or “imaginary.” During this study, Jacobs reports, non-believers wavered from their disbelief after being reminded of their morality. They were slower to label concepts like “God” and “heaven” as imaginary. I’m not convinced that being slower to categorize heaven as “imaginary” is evidence that ath…
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…“At least seven countries — Australia, Bangladesh, Germany, India, Nepal, New Zealand and Pakistan — permit citizens to choose an option other than male or female on their passports.” More from ABC: The Attorney-General George Brandis had warned a defeat would result in delaying same-sex marriage in Australia for years to come. But the Federal Opposition says the plebiscite would have resulted in harmful debate against the gay and lesbian communi…
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…Israeli who trained for a decade in American studios before moving to New Zealand where he joined the team that made Avatar. Similar enthusiasm about Cameron’s film was voiced in the American Jewish press. In The Forward, the popular and culturally astute New York Jewish weekly, regular columnist Jay Michaelson wrote a January 22 piece titled “Taking Avatar Seriously: Environmentalisms, Spiritual and Practical,” describing the film’s philosophy a…
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…had been tweeted by Virtual Abbey the night before. That took me into the New Zealand Book of Common Prayer, with a brief sojourn into the tragedy that is Lindsay Lohan, who, frankly, could use some time reflecting on the “Eternal Spirit, Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver,” if you ask me. Then, while responding to my student I thought I should probably scan posts by other students and, well, there went the next hour. Okay, honestly, I forgot w…
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…each diocesan bishop in the United States, and every bishop in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, the United Kingdom and South Africa has received the offer of a download. Each member of the Council of Cardinals, its secretary, and Pope Francis has received a copy, along with the original Italian-languages essays. If the hierarchy will consider what history really says, perhaps they will think about whether they need to restore the tradition of wom…
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…white Ukrainian refugees at the US-Mexico border in a matter of hours? CBS News foreign correspondent Chris D’Agata provided an unintentionally revealing answer to these questions in February 2022, when he suggested that Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, was an unexpected site of war, because it was “civilized,’’ unlike “Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades.” Though D’Agata provided a formulaic apology soon thereafter, if not…
Read More…ly transformative as the election of Barack Obama. As noted on NPR, in New Zealand’s National Business Review and others, is a report to be published in Nature that for the first time scientists have decoded a cancer genome (a genome is the entire DNA sequence of a cell—all 3 billion base pairs in this case). While this is a monumental step in the ‘War on Cancer’ President Nixon declared in 1971—a war, by the way, most expected to win easily withi…
Read More…ening to return. This week’s Time magazine recounted the story (headline: “New Jersey Police Suspect Cult Activity in Grave Robbing”) of a body taken from a mausoleum in Pleasantville, New Jersey. As police sometimes do when no motive is apparent, it suggested the crime might have been committed by a “cult.” The article even contained a link to a piece from 1978 entitled “The Quandary of the Cults.” To a historian of American religion, this link…
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…council meetings. Criminalizing libraries and librarians While most of the new playbook isn’t really new, and simply builds on its original themes, there is one new model bill that bears special attention because it builds out a new dimension of Project Blitz’s religious and political vision, and exposes their view of democratic institutions. Indeed, the bill became infamous months before it morphed into a secret model in the Project Blitz playboo…
Read More…This is because society recognises the importance of the setting in which new human life, new members of society come into existence. “It is of vital importance to society that the definition of marriage is protected, sustained and supported.” India: Couple’s high-profile marriage in defiance of anti-gay law BuzzFeed reported last week on a gay couple that was married in a religious ceremony at the end of January. “A Sanskrit teacher conducted th…
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