Religion Dispatches
…said Courtney Kendrick, whose C Jane Enjoy It blog is ranked among the top 800 blogs on Technorati. By comparison, Times and Seasons is ranked at about 31,000, and By Common Consent is ranked at about 25,000. Mormon Mommy Wars is ranked at about 40,000. Kendrick has blogged in the past for Segullah, a blog that is included on the list at the Mormon Archipelago, an online portal that aggregates blogs in the Bloggernacle, but she now prefers to wri…
Read MoreThere’s an old joke in newsrooms that goes if you can find three examples of something, it’s automatically worthy of a trend story. And so, according to the rule, it’s too early to call this a trend. Still, it is interesting that two news stories came out yesterday about school districts ending government-endorsed religious observances because they recognize that they would probably lose a costly First Amendment battle. Could it be that in the wa…
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…and the message, but actually hungry for both. When I spoke to Bell on the phone a couple weeks after the event in Durham, he told me, In some ways what I do is basic pastoring. It’s, you give people an idea, you let them respond to it, you give them another idea….it’s basic spiritual direction. Like the itinerant rabbi, the guru—not to say that I’m a guru—but there’s a long tradition [of that kind of work]. But so many people right now are rethin…
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…udio was opened by a longtime editor at Glamour, Suze Yalof Schwartz. In a phone interview, Yalof Schwartz said that she decided to open the studio when she couldn’t easily find a place to learn meditation. I asked Yalof Schwartz how Unplug differed from the dozens of Buddhist centers that immigrants and hippies have sprinkled across the hills of Southern California. “Meditation is a science,” she replied. “It’s literally build[ing] your brain. Yo…
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…ills, I fished in my bag for the tiny microphone I planned to use with my iPhone, to record our conversation. “Is that what you’re using?” he asked, with great interest. He held up his own phone. “I just got one of these. Will this really work?” He sat next to me on the couch as I pointed him through the app store on his phone. “There it is,” I said, pointing to iTalk. “That’s what I’m using.” He tapped the screen, but the app that came up for dow…
Read More…tors are caught in the middle, and the voters themselves are… well… making phone calls and holding marches, because what else is there to do? (When I called the office of one member of the Public Health Committee to register my opposition to SB-1433, the staffer on the phone said, “Goodness, it seems like everyone in Oklahoma is calling.” I wearily replied that most of the calls must be in support of the bill, right? “Oh, no,” she said. “Against i…
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…ouse. She reported that, whenever she tried to speak to this friend on the phone in the house about the haunting, the phone connection would be interrupted. As a busy woman with two kids, Maria doesn’t always have a lot of time to devote to spirituality, but when she does, she often relies on intuition. In the case of the haunting, she reports that her intuition pointed her toward the conclusion that it’s the land on which the house was built that…
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…lary would be a swear, we kept it,” explains Caleb. He cites the example of 1 Kings 18:27. “That passage in the Hebrew is saying to them: ‘Your God can’t hear you. He’s off taking a crap in the bushes.’ So we kept ‘shit’ there. But there were other places where we had ‘shit’ because a swear would make it funnier and then we decided to cut that out in those places.” I later consult the Oxford Annotated Bible where a tiny footnote confirms: the Hebr…
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…d to be in opposition to their values. It is that anger that led to the May 17 attack. Ana says the attack “was and is still viewed by the Church as a clash of cultures, a justified defense of Georgian tradition in the face of encroaching Western influence.” ISIS: Executions of gay men continue; cited by UK’s Cameron in debate on military action Bassem Mroue reports for Associated Press on the ongoing targeting and killing of gay men by Islamic St…
Read More…for Marriage has set up on Wednesday nights and we assist with the larger phone bank at the Jewish synagogue downtown. A great deal of our work is communicating with Catholics on our email list and Facebook. As a Catholic, how does your faith shape your views on marriage for LGBT people? My faith blossomed in the 1960s after Vatican II. I had always been a very pious child, and my faith became about service to others and seeing everyone as a chil…
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