Search for "cheap one way airline tickets to newark phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Does Record Number of Religious “Nones” Mean Decline of Religiosity?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…an religiosity—about religion as it is lived in the United States today? A number of what I would see as problems in the Pew report suggest to me that our growing fixation with religion-by-the-numbers may be distracting us from richer, more nuanced understandings of American religious practice. Wanted: A Community that Doesn’t Share My Beliefs and Values Take the demographic category of “Nones” itself. The Pew report notes the difficulty with sur…

Holey Holey Holey: The Problem with a New Study Valuing Religion at $1.2 Trillion Per Year

By Michael Schulson

…e simply, an absurd exercise. So why bother with this kind of research, anyway? Do these numbers tell us anything useful? For one thing, a big economic impact number might jibe with the goals of the elder Grim’s Religious Freedom and Business Foundation. But more generally, as the Grims see it, their study’s intended message seems to be something along the lines of Hey, religion does good things! “A lot of the messages [about religion] that come t…

The Way of the Brother: How Critics Missed the Boat on Tree of Life

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…n either/or choice down life’s path: “There are two ways through life: the way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you’ll follow.” The father (the masculine force, disciplinarian, the god of justice) is pit in distinction to the mother (the feminine force, compassionate, the god of mercy). Marketers have exploited this dualism, and a promotional website for the film carries the title: twowaysthroughlife.com. Comments on th…

Does NIH Head Francis Collins Believe in Intelligent Design?

By Eric Reitan

…ure out how to fit pieces together to achieve a goal. And if it looks that way, there’s reason to think it is that way.” But not all arguments for God’s existence are like this. Leibniz’s argument for God—which rests on trying to account for the fact that there’s something rather than nothing, is clearly not like this. More to the point, suppose you make the case that there seem to be objective moral truths—moral claims whose truth does not depend…

Will Religion Finally Give Peace a Chance? Rising to the Challenge of Nonviolence as Armageddon Looms

By Peter Laarman

…ng your friends, and you will hear plenty of them fall back on the “it’s always been this way” argument: the idea that hierarchical power and its concomitant cruelty and violence is simply the way of the world from time immemorial. Anthropologically, these folks may well have their facts wrong. But even if they are right on the facts, their argument is rather like saying that because winter’s cold is a reality there is no point in bundling up. The…

The Fragility of Our Reality: A Conversation with the Brain Behind PBS Miniseries on Neuroscience

By Michael Schulson

…n to our language, the right kind of tools to talk about this in a natural way. That reveals something even deeper, which is the strength of our intuitions about our conscious experience. I mean, it really feels like the you that wakes up in the morning is the one that’s in charge and driving the boat—and oh, by the way, you happen to own a spleen and a liver and lungs, and a brain also. That’s such a powerful experience. Obviously our langauge ju…

Religion at Decade’s End

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…will continue to change the entire global system in some very catastrophic ways. The apocalyptically-minded have the resources to read these trends one way. The sudden popular anxiety over the Mayan predictions of cataclysm in 2012 speaks among other things to the pervasive cultural appetite for such apocalyptic visions these days. But the temptations of a facile apocalypticism are important to resist. In the waning light of reality, in late 2009…

“Even the Rich Suffer”: An Interview with Google’s Jolly Good Fellow Chade-Meng Tan

By Max Zahn

…ot explain the love that comes from compassion. So, I think it’s not a one way street; it’s a multi-way street. Everybody can learn from everybody else. If you’re careful to do that, then it’s not patronizing. Then it’s like sharing. Like, everyone brings a dish to the potluck. You have said that you chose to focus on the corporate world because that way you can move the world’s most powerful people toward change. Yes. At the same time, the fact I…

A Religious History of American Neuroscience

By Leigh Eric Schmidt

…heme since the Enlightenment. 2) The second pivot point is recognizing the way that the nation’s religious history shapes the way the mind has been and continues to be imagined, even in many of the study designs on meditation that emerge among contemporary neuroscientists. As novel as it may sound to be monitoring the brainwaves of Tibetan Buddhist monks in university laboratories, it is certainly not the first time that American psychologists hav…

Can Islam Save The Economy?

By Nathan Schneider

…t,” he says, “to reach out to the subprime borrowing population in a safer way, in a way that makes the risks more transparent and allows better risk diversification.” With or without the utopian theories, the constraints imposed by interpretations of a bygone religious law have given rise to a laboratory for different ways of doing business. Because of its religiously-obligated client base, Islamic banking remains insulated, in part, from the con…