Religion Dispatches
…ing to eliminate key historical figures.” For the most part, publishers of high school textbooks are reluctant to discuss the Texas controversy, even though it’s acknowledged that they have been following it closely. Sinauer Associates is a small publishing house that publishes college-level science textbooks, some of which are used in high school advanced placement classes. Sinauer, along with W.H. Freeman jointly published Hillis’ Science of Bio…
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…ia grows; The Washington Post’s Jon Emont reported this week, “Indonesia’s highest court is deliberating whether sex outside marriage should be made illegal in the world’s third-largest democracy, in the latest push by conservative Islamist organizations to restructure the country’s relatively secular legal code.: If the court revises the law to forbid casual sex, gay sexual relations would become illegal for the first time in Indonesian history,…
Read More…ell-off people (residents of the “easiest places” in the U.S.) make mainly high-end, consumerist web searches. Shiny digital gizmos, especially cameras, garner the special interest of the comfortable, along with various appurtenances related to the thriving of lucky babies. As someone who is neither tech-savvy nor the parent of a fortunate child, I couldn’t recognize many of these searches, apart from sussing out the general categories. Among the…
Read More…han the Republican base, and includes a far more significant (and growing) number of unaffiliated voters, avowed secularists (who are both non-believers and religious people) and religious minorities. And because more of those people like the Establishment Clause and would shudder at religiously-directed public policy. Given that the Gun Violence Prevention Sabbath had the support of a variety of faith traditions, it’s a good question to ask why i…
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…sons not in the labor force is growing. While some are getting richer, the numbers tell us, middle income earners are hobbled by shrinking purchasing power, disappearing job opportunities, and increasingly out-of-reach education. This is problem enough for the many who work hard and can’t figure out why they’re “losing ground,” as Pew wrote. Add to that fears of terrorism. People want relief. But if no solution presents itself, either lassitude or…
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…ller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It drew a number of high-profile participants and attendees from anti-gay religious activists in the U.S. A centerpiece of the “Humanum” conference was a set of six videos, which it turns out were produced by Mark Regnerus, author of a discredited report on “family structures” that is still widely cited by anti-gay activists. Conservative activists, including Tony Perkins, Brian Brow…
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…kind of wimpy. But then you can never be too sure, can you?) My mention of high schoolers supposes that American high schoolers with a “cause” can get their hands on major weaponry. Yes, they can! And please understand that the LAST thing I want to do is interfere with their Second Amendment rights. So-called “privacy” is negotiable; the Right to Bear Arms is not. As you and I know full well, access to guns is not the issue here. Bad intent is the…
Read More…scenario, Jains run a number of large institutions with many employees, a high number of whom are not Jain. At some point, a number of people realize that the current system is a complicated and inefficient way to feed people, and so there are attempts at reforming the system. One of the questions that the would-be reformers have to consider is: What do most people, in fact, eat? That’s important, because they are trying to craft a system that ta…
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…ys Mark was the first Internet age megachurch celebrity pastor and leading number one podcasts, number one sermon downloads, those kinds of things. So what that did is, elevated Mark to the stratosphere so quickly, whereas you might think…typically they may take 20-30 years of faithful ministry, but the Internet just propelled things with such rapidity, and the Internet only sees how you speak, that’s all the Internet is, it’s all about verbal art…
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…ilization is only on the surface. One day people will riot in much greater numbers than in the late eighties”… Today, the person who controls the two banners [of religion and nationality] in Tibet is none other than the Dalai Lama, who enjoys the status both of the highest spiritual leader and the internationally recognized symbol of Tibetan nationhood. These remarkably candid words from one of China’s most important writers on Tibetan issues demo…
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