Search for "breaking newstoday cleantalkorg2.ru bbc news Read Breaking News Today news today Politics Stock Market breaking newstoday"

The Atheist Encounter with Christianity: A Failure to Disbelieve?

By Paul Wallace

…a bad scientific idea, is quickly discarded because it does not speak the truth about the world. A true myth survives because it resonates deeply with lived human experience. A true myth brings one face-to-face with reality and has nothing to do with literalism or the ignoring of scientific evidence. To get to my point: There is found in each of these excerpts, a disconnect between the author’s idea of Christianity and what Christianity actually i…

Sikh Temple Shooting: Two Massacres and the Virtual Transformation of Trauma

By Shruti Devgan

…and 2012. I loathe to say this, but what if the 1984 massacre had happened today? Could the ruthless terror unleashed on innocent Sikhs have been curtailed before it became a trauma of magnifying proportions that the world continues to remain oblivious to? Could the effects of that trauma have been lessened? Even today it is only a handful of what sociologist Arlene Stein calls ‘memory-workers’ who are using the internet in defining 1984 as a trau…

Updated: My Work on Confederate Monuments Leaves This Christian Ethicist Distrustful of Calls for Reconciliation and Healing

By Ryan Andrew Newson

…o not seem as popular among those who’ve been on the receiving end of the Trump administration’s more destructive, racist, draconian policies. I don’t see immigration lawyers and activists, especially among the Latinx community, clamoring for unity. Nor are my Muslim friends, who’ve dealt with rampant Islamophobia within the Trump administration. Nor are climate change scientists who have watched the Republican party deny the very existence of glo…

The Devil is in the Details

By Amina Wadud

Today is my last official day for completing local business before departure. I’ve balanced my checkbook and paid all of my bills except the ones that are automatically paid (which is about the same as being paid, when the checking account from which they are drawn has been balanced). I’ve taken out cash for travel with the knowledge that using ATMs abroad is always a great way to get the best rates. Yep that’s right. The U.S. always considers it…

A Writer’s Murder Raises Fears of Death-by-Decree

By Shalom Goldman

…probate who insulted the Prophet to hell.” And one of the official Iranian newspapers wrote approvingly that “Azerbaijan’s Salman Rushdie is dead.” As 70% of Azerbaijanis are Shia with allegiances to the Iranian clergy, it did not prove difficult to incite someone to murder Rafiq Tagi. In December seven prominent intellectuals called on the European Union to investigate the circumstances of Tagi’s death. Among them were Taslima Nasrin, Richard Daw…

The High Church of Art

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…es. Sweeney’s curatorial work was aimed at preventing the crasser kinds of marketing and the trivialization of the New Age. The historical dimension of this story is important; in some ways the Fifties and Sixties seem impossibly far away, compared to the way religion and spirituality are represented in mainstream America today. Just compare King’s bold speech before the Lincoln Memorial in the early 1960s, to Glenn Beck’s and Sarah Palin’s religi…

The Tragedy of Religious Freedom

By Patrick Hornbeck

…ation, it would be unfair for civil courts to allow the Episcopal Church’s rules to trump state law. The breakaway diocese has appealed to the Supreme Court, which recently asked the national church to reply. In a word, all these cases are about self-determination—the capacity of a religious institution to decide for itself what it means to be complicit in what it views as sin, to legally identify as a religious institution, or to retain property…

Pressure Grows on Obama to Reject Anti-LGBT Religious Exemption

By Sarah Posner

…rates calls made since 2011 for Obama to rescind the Bush executive order. Today’s letter, in contrast to yesterday’s letter from over 50 legal scholars, is more focused on framing religious freedom as a core American value that is protected, rather than endangered, by rejecting the religious exemption. The legal scholars focused more on constitutional law and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in making the case that neither Free Exercise Clau…

Mormon-Born Daya Mata Typifies American Yoga

By Andrea R. Jain

…n encouraging members of the Self-Realization Fellowship to enter into a guru-disciple relationship with the official gurus of the tradition, including Babaji, Krishna, and Jesus, as well as Yogananda himself. She taught that the gurus, having attained loving union with God, could help their disciples attain that same goal. Having taken the vow of renunciation, Daya Mata prescribed that path for those who, like her, wanted to devote their entire l…

To Be Queer, Gifted, and Black: A Conversation with Theologian Pamela Lightsey

By Nyasha Junior

…to think about faith itself more broadly. In the book, I’m trying to construct for the readers a sense of the faith that is beyond the normative articulations and that embraces [LGBTQ black women] for their wholeness as human beings, as sexual persons, in a way that is celebratory and in a way that strongly asserts their sacred worth. That’s important because in many spaces the well-being and sacred worth of black queer women, black lesbian women…