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Papal Profanity: The Vatican’s Pagan Museum

…eum) were recently forced to send a lot of Greek works of art back, not to Greece, but to Rome. It’s all a bit bewildering, but fascinating at the same time.   Which leads me to a second project, a book about the Greek island of Crete where I excavated for five years. I want to use Cretan history as a way to illustrate a very different way of conceptualizing identity, a more cosmopolitan way, than the one promoted by multiculturalism. Odysseus’s f…

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Could Orthodoxy Be Having its Vatican II Moment?

…lem, and Cyprus, and from traditional Orthodox countries, Serbia, Romania, Greece, Albania, Poland, and the Czech Lands and Slovakia, but also hierarchs who serve in parts of the globe not usually associated with Orthodox Christianity, from Asia, Africa, Western Europe, and from North America. In and of itself, such a universal gathering represents a singular and significant event in the life of the Church demonstrating the new global reach of Ort…

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“The Slut Assumption”: Myths About Jewelry Reveal Diamonds Aren’t Always A Girl’s Best Friend

…ve exerted a powerful control over the minds of men and women from ancient Greece and India to the contemporary cinema. The stories about sex and jewelry in my book are myths in the sense of stories believed by many people over a long period, despite persistent evidence that they are not factually true. The point I try to make in my conclusion is that though myths fly in the face of reason, they have power over us because they play into our ration…

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Predicting the Future of Religion: A Thought Experiment

…r upswing evangelicals and Pentecostals will hold strong or increase their numbers. Our historian looking back on the twenty-first century may indeed lament the collapse of mainstream Protestantism in the United States, which at one time undergirded so much of American identity. She may lament that the country now seems split between an irreligious half and an evangelical one. What about the Roman Catholic Church in the United States? In many ways…

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God-Full In Toronto, Jesus Christ Hit By a Car; The Week in Religion, Poetically

…exhume dead family members after three years to make room for new burials, Greece has decided to allow bodies to be cremated in spite of conflicts with their Orthodox religious tradition. Kendall Gibson has spent 10 years of his prison sentence in isolation for refusing to cut his dreadlocks. A measure of his Rastafarian faith, Gibson says that his punishment is “not for his crimes but for a crime he will not commit against God.” After being outed…

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“I Had No Intention to Write Atheistically”: Darwin, God, and the 2500-Year History of the Debate

…ilosophers of science believe so today. These issues are as old as ancient Greece, where scientific rationalism first flourished, but revived and became even more pressing with the advent of Darwinism 150 years ago this fall. “I Had No Intention to Write Atheistically” In November, 1859, within a week of receiving a pre-publication copy of his former student’s bold new book, On the Origin of Species, the great nineteenth-century Cambridge Universi…

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Greek Riots: “It’s a beautiful thing, freedom.”

The four days of rioting in Athens, Greece, bring several personal memories to mind. The first took place on the western coasts of Crete, at an archaeological excavation with which I’d been involved for several years. The local head of the thirty-or-so workers we had employed, a lovely man who has since gone to his reward, was gazing out at the sea during a midday break, smoking a cigarette, quietly staring. When I asked him what he was thinking…

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RDBook: Bernard Avishai’s The Hebrew Republic

…recendented within the European context. Other European countries, such as Greece, have naturalization laws that give preferential treatment to returning nationals. Yet such European states also provide secular and non-discriminatory guidelines that allow other immigrants to become full and equal citizens. Israel has no such legislation. Creating one would be a sine qua non for Israel to become more integrated economically with the EU. As one EU c…

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Zeitgeist A Blend Of Skepticism, Metaphysical Spirituality, and Conspiracy

…another in a long line of law givers that includes Manu of India, Minos of Greece, and Mises of Egpyt. (See, they even all start with M, the film points out, suggesting a mysterious connection.) Similarly, the Ten Commandments are a derivative version of passages from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. For Zeitgeist, there’s nothing new under the sun-worshipers. The Bible is an “Astrotheological Literary Hybrid.” At the conclusion of Part I of Zeitgei…

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Thank You, Satanists

…er? Likewise the atheists who delivered the opening prayer at the infamous Greece, New York, town meeting, after courts ruled that such prayer was somehow legal. The fact that it was atheist prayer seemed meant to “prove a point,” and that point, to me, was that New Atheists have become just another religious sect, and they should get off their high horse. (Note: atheists get REALLY MAD when you say this.) But now that SCOTUS has ushered in a new…

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