Religion Dispatches
…has now been taken down, having failed to advance a positive image of the country.) That the New York Times is reporting on the story indicates how much negative press has been generated; some of the postings are stunningly offensive—and the embassy might be better off looking more seriously into them. Certainly, they do not help the current Israeli government’s declining popularity in the eastern half of the West. More worryingly, the deliberat…
Read More…spirituality, meaning-making, and self-realization in my Nones Beyond the Numbers narrative survey.* *The survey results will contribute to three intertwined research projects I am currently conducting on the meaning-making practices of Nones. The first, sponsored in part through the Social Science Research Council’s “New Directions in the Study of Prayer” initiative, will explore the plurality of Nones who say they regularly engage in prayer….
Read More…ss, and fifteen were reported to be suffering ill effects. In spite of the number of people who experienced difficulties during each of the eight fifteen-minute rounds, Ray contends he did not know that there were problems. In fact, Ray is accused of ignoring the pleas of those who wanted out; in one case an individual went out through the side of the sweat lodge to escape the heat. The prosecution played tapes of Ray before the sweat saying, “It’…
Read More
…rch and prayer are all highly concentrated in the Bible Belt. They rise on Sunday everywhere.” Other patterns are more jarring: “Relative to the rest of the country, for every search I looked at, retirement communities search more about hell,” he writes. Each month, on average, 422 people in the US ask Google “Why did God make me ugly?” and 103 ask “Why did God make me black?” The most common God-related question, asked over 25,000 times per month…
Read More
…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
…minated the headlines, but Cruz has been called a “firebrand” by Bloomberg News, while the New York Times says he uses “the most bellicose language,” second only to Trump. In Washington, Cruz is known for his showmanship, inflexibility and lack of teamwork—of which he is proud. He refused, for instance, to vote along with his party to extend the debt limit, and when this earned him the exasperation of his colleagues, he gleefully recounted their a…
Read More
…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…
Read More
…ust be made to enforce it. In the April 2007 priesthood session, a musical number was provided by a men’s chorus. The chorus was selected and trained by Brigham Young University professor Rosalind Hall, who also chose the music for the choir—but Hall was not allowed to attend the performance; instead, she was replaced by a male colleague, Ronald Staheli, for that one event. In fact, Hall was not even allowed to be in the conference hall to hear he…
Read More