Religion Dispatches
…ountries—and other serial offenders such as Egypt and northern Nigeria and Saudi Arabia—is the rise of religious fundamentalism. Persecuted and Forgotten? underlines the rise of militant Islamist aggression against Christianity—and the same concern can be raised regarding Hinduism in India and Buddhism in Sri Lanka and elsewhere.” Perhaps violence against Christians has increased as the report suggests. However, there is a danger in a one-sided re…
Read More…round the world. At the same time, Arabs and South Asians began to work in Saudi Arabia in huge numbers and brought a new and more conservative understanding of Islam back to their home countries. Combine this with the Iranian Revolution of 1978-9 and we have a significant percentage of the Muslim majority world experiencing this moment. – In view of these last two points, it is interesting to read the many threads that make the argument along the…
Read More…ia Avenue. I propose that we ban driving towards a safer world for babies. Saudi Arabia has taken the pioneering step by banning women from driving. The next courageous step is to ban driving altogether. This will eliminate all likelihood of rear-ending, lost babies, and dead pregnant women. Apart from driving, perhaps, indeed, the woman and her man ought to be fined for being pregnant. If she hadn’t gotten pregnant in the first place, why, she wo…
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…in the states that are the most likely to criminalize the practice? Don’t bet on it. And certainly don’t bet on the bishops threatening to withhold communion from a politician over it. No follow-up questions, please A third trend: as many of the examples above show, anti-abortion “centrists” are a little too coy about what they’re willing to accept in order to maintain the criminalization of abortion. This is especially important to me because th…
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…Improving educator training so they can do this effectively? Absolutely. I bet more Americans would be attracted to, appreciate and consider careers in science (the number is decreasing annually). I bet we’d have more productive conversation among students and leaders of science and religion around the many profound issues in our nation that engage both: abortion, medical care, stem cells, homosexuality, and genomic research. The battle rhetoric w…
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…efforts by proving that children raised by intact mom-and-dad families do better than kids raised by two loving moms or dads. It won’t matter that the study didn’t do that. Blamers Also a safe bet: natural disasters like Hurricane-Superstorm Sandy will continue to be chalked up to God’s anger at the advance of gay rights. So will tragedies like the mass murder of students and educators at Sandy Hook elementary school. But those blamers will sound…
Read More….” Lavie added that he had discovered, from conversations with former Shin Bet and Mossad espionage agency personnel, that their organizations had also seen the same disparity between oral and written doctrine, which had helped deepen the mistaken conception. In this way, one initial assumption based on quicksand gives rise to a concatenating series of mistaken judgments. Each judgment leads to one of greater import and severity. Before long, you…
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…happiness achieve it. But there’s a tension in the natural order of things between what promotes happiness and what morality demands. Hence, unless there is a supernatural order of things bringing happiness to the morally good, the highest good is little more than a pipe dream. But reason demands that it be more than a pipe dream. And so reason demands that we posit a supernatural power. Put simply, we have to suppose that moral heroes who risk th…
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…rse be taken with a grain of salt. That being said, I would absolutely not bet in Judge Patrick’s favor, knowing what we do about her fondness for conspiratorial and explicitly QAnon-linked “prophets” and the broader interplay between QAnon conspiracies and conservative Christian beliefs in American society. On the other hand, given the number of judges Donald Trump was able to appoint during his term as president, I wouldn’t bet the farm against…
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…it was logical that the women would inquire about the obvious differences between their role and status and those of men, especially as it affects their ministerial effectiveness. What surprised some people was the frankness of the discussion. The tone, perhaps more than the content, is what is new. Women expect to be taken seriously and even popes have to listen. They asked Francis about women preaching, something that deacons do. He replied tha…
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