Religion Dispatches
…. And yet I was told that not one of us did or said anything to fight back against the ugliness and barbarity of indiscriminate violence. Too many people—not just dentists on Virgin Airlines—make statements like, “Muslims don’t do enough to reject terrorism.” It’s probable many of them have never met Muslims. If they tried, they might be surprised. In fact, the reaction to my essay—you’ll read an excerpt below—has surprised me, too. I wish I cou…
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…cut by his own father. But God stayed the knife. Both sons – Ishmael and Isaac – received promises that they would father great nations. With these narratives, monotheism and western civilization begin. And the Canaanite practices of child sacrifice to Moloch are forever left behind by the descendants of Abraham. Except they are not. What does Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac have to do with accusations of child sacrifice and the anti-Jewish “blood li…
Read More…riking, though, was how all three female justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, fired the most challenging questions at the companies’ lawyer, Paul Clement, confronting the essential underpinnings of his clients’ claims. In particular, they questioned whether RFRA was intended to cover corporations, whether a party can claim a religious exemption if granting it impacts the rights of others (in this case, the companies’ em…
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…ue wasn’t the kind of thing that we could call a “motherfucker.” It was incapable of the act—too abstract to be blamed or cursed. Recent findings in cognitive psychology indicate that we blame at an individual level, using mental systems adapted for life in small groups. It is psychologically difficult to blame large, abstract entities—like government agencies or corporations—in a meaningful or satisfactory way. Ideologies and conspiracy theories…
Read More…who are “devout”, they have dedicated themselves to strengthening their imaan [religious belief] in an attempt to overcome them. The men are part of a small support group which began on a web forum. Some of the members now meet every few months to discuss how they are managing their sexual feelings. In some British Muslim communities, homosexuality can be a controversial issue: some believe the act counts as a form of “zina” – an Arabic term refe…
Read More…n the A&E network pitting Kieran Donahue, sheriff of Canyon County, Idaho, against Dan Sevy, leader of the Followers of Christ Church in a conflict that centers on child endangerment and religious rights. The larger issue, however, concerns those states that allow groups to ignore or reject traditional medical practices on the grounds of religious freedom. In a nutshell, religious exemption statutes allow faith-based institutions to avoid civil an…
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…this week, and in the wake of a terrorist attack in Brussels, President Obama sat in a Havana stadium extolling the sacred power of baseball to a trio of ESPN commentators: I did not play a lot of baseball as a kid; I was more of a basketball player, but there is something about baseball that is so fundamentally woven into our culture. And in some ways, at a time in our lives where everything is a mile a minute and kids are on their phone all the…
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…e.” Then, as men and boys strode past them into the Tabernacle where they awaited the opportunity to move to the Conference Center where the session would take place, members of Ordain Women lined up individually or in pairs to request and be denied admission by church representative Doug Peterson. According to Mike Stevens of Ogden, Utah, who stood nearby and filmed the exchanges, each woman had a brief exchange with Peterson, along the lines of…
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…Your Fault, a series on blame in contemporary society by RD’s The Cubit. AA: Is it fair to say that the psychological mechanisms we use for blaming are tuned for judging human individuals? BM: Yes. Because that’s the only place, and the only context, in which we can actually learn this. The way my research group has thought for a while about how blame emerges developmentally and gets refined in the course of growing up in a community, is really…
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…England Society for Psychic Research (NESPR) Seekers of the Supernatural Paracon as part of our research for our book The Exorcist Effect (named for a phenomenon we discussed in these pages after the release of Conjuring 3). I certainly didn’t expect the crowd. The Paracon, held the weekend before Halloween, is based around the work of Ed and Lorraine Warren, the famous demon-hunting couple whose case files are the basis of the billion-dollar Con…
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