Search Results for:

cheap airline tickets chicago to miami phone number 1-800-299-7264

A Startling Number Believe You Can Be Jewish Jesus Follower; Why It’s Not As Crazy As It Sounds

…that number seems staggeringly high. A full third? Once you delve into the numbers, though, 34% doesn’t seem quite so high. Really, Pew has asked an excellent question—a question that reveals the full tangle of ambiguities and inconsistencies that surround the topic of Jewish identity. First, some background: when the researchers at Pew set out to conduct this survey, they quickly ran into a problem that’s been under discussion for at least two th…

Read More

Just Like January 6, One of the Most Disturbing Aspects of the Right-Wing Coup Attempt in Germany is Who Was Behind It

…tails ties to the Reichsbürger milieu. Experts attribute the stark rise in numbers to a heightened awareness and the agencies’ attempts to reduce the number of unreported cases. The conservative Minister of the interior of the previous Merkel administration, Horst Seehofer, had always refused to conduct a study of right-wing sentiments in the police and military, in spite of the warnings of social scientists who urged him to commission one. For ye…

Read More

Why are Nuns and Monks in the Streets? (Parts I & II)

…he early afternoon, cameras in hand. It is not uncommon for tourists to outnumber monks in the debate courtyards during this time. This is obviously disruptive, making a spectacle out of a serious educational pursuit. Monastic response to the Chinese government policy of limiting monastic enrollments is at least in part the result of a clash between the secular, materialist, security-concerned worldview of the Chinese state, and the religious, tra…

Read More

Religion and Other Animals

…nimals than have children. Polls consistently indicate that an astonishing number of people—in some cases more than ninety-nine percent—hold their dog or cat to be a “family member.” Communities of faith are among the institutions that are most responsive to the complex connections between humans and other animals. One increasingly finds that contemporary religious communities have reinstituted the ancient practice known often as “blessing of the…

Read More

Spinning Ft. Hood

…akes a more direct observation about this sort of overdetermination in the Chicago Tribune: Like a bad recurring nightmare, we heard of another incident. A disgruntled office worker in Orlando, Jason S. Rodriguez, went on a shooting spree in the offices he was laid off from two years ago. In the days and weeks to follow, there will be much speculation and dissection of the motives and lives of these two deeply troubled individuals, but I suspect t…

Read More

Response to Daniel Philpott: the Politics of Religious Freedom

…learning from our colleagues and exploring these complex histories over a number of years, we have found that religious liberty is not a single, stable principle existing outside of history, as it is often depicted (particularly in policy circles in North America and Europe and by many academics invested in promoting religious freedom). It is, rather, an inescapably context-bound, polyvalent concept unfolding within divergent histories in differi…

Read More

7 Women Scholars On the Gender Divide in Religious Studies, the Power of Mentors, and Leading While Female

…ldless. LEADING WHILE FEMALE Elaine Howard Ecklund: Even with an increased number of women working in the sociology of religion, there aren’t many women who are named chairs in universities. The number of women in the sociology of religion who hold tenure track jobs, earn tenure, get published, and get cited is not changing as fast as we would expect, giving that we are seeing gender parity in terms of who earns a graduate degree. There are conver…

Read More

Magic in the Air: How Intellectuals Invented the Myth of a Mythless Society

…y, and the Birth of the Human Sciences Jason Josephson-Storm University of Chicago Press May 2017 However, I knew full well that many Americans and Europeans also believed in protective icons and spiritual premonitions. In fact, my grandmother was a famous professor of anthropology who after her retirement went public with her belief in spirits and ecstatic trances; throughout my childhood I remember scholars, scientists, and artists travelling fr…

Read More

It’s Bring Your Gun to Church Day

…on a bevy of political organizations that court—and receive—support from a number of world leaders and US political figures. On January 20, as the inaugural festivities wound down, it was left to the Rev. Joseph C. Lowery, a true hero of the civil and human rights movements, to close out the ceremonies with a benediction. And he didn’t disappoint. With his well-worn voice, Lowery brought the poetry, prose and hardscrabble reality of a life spent i…

Read More

It’s The Apocalypse, Stupid: Understanding Christian Opposition to Obamacare, Civil Rights, New Deal and More

…ents. In this story a ruler invests in his servants, giving each of them a number of talents, or money. He then goes away to another kingdom. When he comes back he wants to know what they’ve done with their talents. Some had buried their talents, afraid of losing it. Some had lost the money, wasting their talents. But some had invested wisely and made more money. So the returning ruler rewarded those who had invested wisely and maximized their tal…

Read More