Religion Dispatches
…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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…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…
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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…
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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…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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…nted for 60% of employment in 1979 accounted for only 46% by 2012; and the number of persons not in the labor force is growing. While some are getting richer, the numbers tell us, middle income earners are hobbled by shrinking purchasing power, disappearing job opportunities, and increasingly out-of-reach education. This is problem enough for the many who work hard and can’t figure out why they’re “losing ground,” as Pew wrote. Add to that fears o…
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…The systematic destruction of Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, and even Muslim holy sites (and the erection of churches in their ruins) was a central component of the Goan Inquisition, a nearly two-century campaign sanctioned by the Catholic Church to convert non-believers—often violently—into Christianity. But the violence of the Portuguese era did not manage to “win hearts and minds.” British missionaries, schooled in the ways of catering to native popul…
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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…
Read More…think Sanders and his movement will be strongly influential. There are any number of priorities Sanders could choose from, of course. God knows it’s not like our nation isn’t in need of reform. At the moment, though, I’m less concerned with the pros and cons of any one issue than wondering what things might look like if Bernie tapped into what Rev. William Barber has named “fusion politics.” In the Christian Century, Jeremy Borden describes this a…
Read More…ent to allow trans woman to change legal gender A court ordered government officials to allow a transgender woman to change the gender in official registration and on her national Identity Card. Italy: European Court of Human Rights slams failure to recognize same-sex couples’ marriages On December 14 the European Court of Human Rights condemned Italy for refusing to recognize the unions of same-sex couples married in other countries: The ECHR acc…
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