Religion Dispatches
…oc, no injuries.] A tweet from Daniel Seidemann, founder of Terrestrial Jerusalem: By the way: this Zionist, and Israeli patriot says now: missiles near Jerusalem does not make the Palestinian suffering in Gaza justifiable — Daniel Seidemann (@DanielSeidemann) November 16, 2012 More political reading: Matt Duss at The American Prospect on why the military attack on Gaza was a gamble for Israel, and one that won’t solve the problem it purports to a…
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…onal values, abstinence, and families despite tremendous pressure from the West.” Perkins also quotes Scott Lively, who called the prayer “a model for all Christian leaders in the world.” State Department spokesperson Nicole Thompson told the Blade that the Obama administration continues to express its opposition to the bill, particularly to its implications for the fight against HIV/AIDS: “The United States shares the concerns of several members…
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…s offer important insights into what we might think of as the late-modern, West Coast offspring of the Cambridge Metaphysicals of so much interest in historical studies of contemporary spirituality. Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality. Second edition with a New Preface (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005, 2012). A second edition of Schmidt’s 2005 go-to volume on the historical roots contemporary Amer…
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…to last week’s Pew Research Center report that U.S. birth rates hit the lowest ever recorded in 2011, with just 63 births per 1000 women of childbearing age (compared to 71 per 1000 in 1990). Americans used to be good at populating the planet, Douthat laments. “Our famous religiosity, our vast interior and wide-open spaces (and the four-bedroom detached houses they make possible), and our willingness to welcome immigrants” gave us a “demographic…
Read More…them. In general, when women can exercise some control over the timing and number of pregnancies they have, many of them opt to do so; not because they are mindlessly driven to do so by the sociological version of Van Der Waals forces, but because undergoing pregnancy and giving birth to babies involves trade-offs specific to women. There are health risks that come with pregnancy, up to and including death. Less dramatically, there are things you…
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…trospective Rundowns who had very traumatic experiences. There have been a number of cases in which people have died under mysterious circumstances in Clearwater, Florida, [the center of Scientology in the U.S.], but nothing as traumatic as what Lisa went through. That was truly unique because it happened in Church headquarters. What I would say is that some of the Scientology processes have a destabilizing effect on some people. And certain peop…
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…cular advocacy. The organization’s staff includes queer people, women, and African Americans in prominent roles. And, as it’s shifted away from Silverman’s “firebrand” approach to anti-religious messaging, American Atheists has begun to robustly and frequently make the case that anti-racist, feminist, and LGBTQ concerns are key church-state separation issues and should be an integral part of secular advocacy. American Atheists’ current president,…
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…nt and CEO of the Center for Inquiry, an organization I have worked with a number of times (I recently accepted an invitation to join their Speakers’ Bureau) and whose “Living Without Religion” campaign I greatly admire. In his blog, Lindsay wrote that “it’s nice that some politicians are finally willing to acknowledge our existence, but are we so desperate for acceptance that we’ll allow others to condescendingly misdescribe us as adherents of a…
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…ble assertion to make in such a tendentious book. Perhaps there is a small number of Americans losing their lives at the hands of hasty harvesters; even a very small number would be too high. But I had a hard time summoning any outrage. In the end I learned much more from Kagan—ironically because his aims are in a way more modest. He wants to convince you of his physicalist stance; however, he doesn’t want to tell you how to reconcile with death….
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…ns. There are other surprises in the study. One of the milder ones is that African Americans are more dubious that vaccination programs take the needs of those being vaccinated into consideration than other demographics across the board. That is to say, African Americans trust the vaccination system to serve whites and Hispanics even less than those groups do! Other surprises: while Americans without a religious faith routinely come in as one of t…
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