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Pagan Martyrs, Murderous Monks: Agora Hits US Shores

By Nathan Schneider

…t religious passions pose to all that is wise and tolerant about the human spirit. Just in time for my own childhood indoctrination (one which I am loathe to disavow), Carl Sagan repeated this telling in his Cosmos TV series. Sagan followed Gibbon in associating Hypatia’s murder with the destruction of Alexandria’s famous library; with her body, away went the literature of the ancient world, lost forever. To remember Hypatia is now to take a stand…

The Sacred and the Dead: I Love You More than Words Can Tell

By David Vanderveen

…aid his bones by the waterside. My favorite verse from the Bible is Genesis 1:2, “…and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” In the water is where I wrestle with God and where the truth of the universe tends to reveal itself to me. It’s home and it’s always humbling. Every July 4 since Mark left us, his friends, family, and neighbors have hosted a community paddle-out where kids, parents, and grandparents paddle to the outer reef at Bro…

The Other, Forgotten Apocalypse of 2011

By Jason Bruner

…arnate in the form, respectively, of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The man reputed to be the Holy Spirit allegedly died when he flung himself off a cliff, believing he would have the ability to fly. Later, in the early years of the Vietnam War, another movement spread which proclaimed that Christ would return, perhaps wearing American clothes and distributing firearms. These rather cursory comments indicate that over the course of…

Meeting on the Bridge: Fr. James Martin’s Ministry to LGBT Catholics Becomes a Book

By Kaya Oakes

…st as excited about the second part of the book, which is a series of Bible passages and meditations and reflections for LGBT Catholics, as I am about the first half of the book. The book is not only the invitation to dialogue between the institutional church and LGBT Catholics, it is a series of spiritual resources that I hope finds its way into the hands of struggling LGBT Catholics, particularly young people, who need to be shown that in the Ol…

Updated: A Response to President Obama’s Speech in Cairo

By Hussein Rashid

…uggests the opposite: We must face these tensions squarely. And so in that spirit, let me speak as clearly and as plainly as I can about some specific issues that I believe we must finally confront together. Compare this to verse 49:13 of the Qur’an which says God created nations and tribes so that we may know one another and the most noble is the one who is best in their conduct. The allusion is quite obvious, and is geared towards at Muslim audi…

One of These Things is Not Like the Other: Religion and the Obama Campaign

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…y. I propose the following as a sort of genealogy of the current confusion. 1) The two main political parties in the United States today are fairly loose coalitions, and since Reagan’s presidential victory in1980, the coalition that fractures worst loses. 2) Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians have been perceived to be a central piece of the center-right Republican coalition since the creation of the “Moral Majority” in 1979. 3) The landscap…

Misusing Cesar Chavez in Immigration Debate

By Luis Leon

…vez staged three public fasts, including the “Love Fast,” begun on February 14, 1968, which ended twenty-five days later with an ecumenical mass in which he broke bread with Robert Kennedy. Each of Chavez’s three public rituals was dubbed a “spiritual fast,” during which he took communion from priests and communed prayerfully with Protestant ministers, rabbis, nuns, and atheists/humanists. Despite posthumous efforts to contain Chavez within an ort…

Liberation Theology is Alive and Well

By Mary E. Hunt

…Senator Maria Silva, a collaborator with the late Chico Mendes (murdered in 1988 by ranchers who opposed his efforts to organize rubber tappers), spoke convincingly of the need for sustainable development and the protection of a biodiverse Amazon. She was the first rubber tapper elected to the Brazilian senate, and served as Minister for the Environment from 2003-2008. Hearing her touch on liberation theology provided a ray of hope that what we ar…

New Age Tragedy in Sedona: Non-Indians in the Sweat Lodge

By Johnny P. Flynn

…omb and emergence allows a new start purified of past events or illnesses, spiritual or physical. The sweat lodge is used in Native American substance abuse treatment programs and has been an integral part of ceremonies of spiritual cleansing of returning veterans dating back to the time of wars with the United States. Many tribes believe that participation in wars and battles cause the dead the cling to the soul of the combatants and must be rele…

Layoffs on the Religious Right

By Bill Berkowitz

…ction, invoked the memory of Winston Churchill while trying to buoy up the spirit of the GOP faithful. “The spirit of Winston Churchill was alive and well on Tuesday night at Focus on the Family Action headquarters,” Minnery said. “You may recall that in the most desperate days of World War II when Great Britain was being pounded daily by Hitler’s Luftwaffe that Winston Churchill called on his countrymen not to despair from danger but to rise to t…