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Violence and Persecution of Christians Worldwide is Theme for Holy Week: A Report from Rome

By Anthea Butler

…g and murder was highlighted. Persons from Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Nigeria and China—all areas where Christians are persecuted—were represented. During the second station of the Via Crucis, Shahbaz Bhatti, the Pakistani Minister for minorities, martyred in 2011 by a group of armed men, was remembered, and later, the injustice of the death penalty around the world. I must admit, I have always liked Holy Week. It is a moment to reflect and ponder the me…

You Asked For It

By Amina Wadud

…are fasting. I don’t think we can make a case about Ramadan and what ever number of incidents that might occur due to some individual Muslims. There is no statistical corollary between fasting, Islam, Muslims and the (still unacceptable) violation. As the nature of the debates over the proposed Islamic cultural center a couple of blocks from Ground Zero has brought to the fore, Islamaphobia is alive and well. For me: I do not condone prejudice ag…

HitchBot Meets His Maker: What a Robot’s Murder Tells Us About Ourselves

By Michael Schulson

…icle about Xiaoice, a Microsoft chatbot that’s gained a major following in China. Xiaoice carries on a lifelike conversation with users. Millions of people chat with it every day. In a Her-like twist, many express affection, even love, for their digital companion. “We’re forgetting what it means to be intimate,” Sherry Turkle told the Times. “Children are learning that it’s safer to talk to a computer than to another human.” My inclination is to a…

How Would Religion Respond to Extraterrestrials? A Thought Experiment

By Ed Simon

…r day in Rome. The pulse—a continuous “beeping” out of a sequence of prime numbers (1,3,5,7,11,13….)—was first detected back in November at the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (or FAST), and then independently by other observatories worldwide And now we find ourselves marking the opening of the so-called “Vatican IV” —an unprecedented ecumenical gathering of religious leaders invited to Rome by Pope Francis III. The rumor is…

Mercy and Justice Can Meet at the Border

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

…had given refugee families that had fled to the Phillipines from communist China. Notably this document establishes that Church custom, since at least the 13th century, was to minister to migrants in their native language. Pius XII also drew special attention to the example of the United States, “Toward the end of the 19th century… great waves of people left Europe and moved especially from Italy to America. As usual the Catholic Church devoted sp…

I’tikaf: Sacred Solitude

By Amina Wadud

…be women-only. I am really curious if the all-women mosques in places like China have this female-only i’tikaf. In lieu of the mosque as the location of the retreat, I used to invite women to spend at least one weekend night, during the last ten days, in my house when I lived in Virginia. I thought if we could give women a reprieve from their regular schedule—a time for greater worship, more dhikr, muraqabah, Qur’an reading, shared suhur, and addi…

Election Update: Oklahoma Bans Shari’ah Law

By Haroon Moghul

…rm us? Travel to other places in the world, like the Persian Gulf, Turkey, China, India, Brazil, and so on and so forth, and people are hungry with ambition, eager to embrace the economic opportunities that our country’s desire for globalization enabled and sustained in the first place. Now, we are turning away; we are scared of monsters whose shadows stretch across the planet. But let me end with a note of hope. Consider that, for most Americans,…

Useless and Useful: A True Sage Reviews The Tao of Happiness

By Alan Levinovitz

…he was a sage (like me, now) and he was definitely an academic, because in China circa 350 BCE, only an academic would be familiar with the esoteric philosophical arguments that the Chuang Tzu so skillfully engages. What little else we know about him comes from the book itself, in which Master Chuang appears fairly regularly, and not always in a flattering light. Are we supposed to emulate him or laugh at him? It’s hard to say. Like most of us enl…

Body of Work: Remembering Daniel Berrigan, 1921-2016

By Michele Somerville

…an old Irish-American guy, was harping on communism and the menace of “Red China” on a weekly basis. I stopped going to mass regularly in the spring of 1972. About thirty years later, personal crisis and desperation led me to search for a church. I had expected, at the beginning of this search, to land in a progressive Episcopal congregation, but surprised myself by winding up, in the year 2000, in a Roman Catholic parish. Why Roman Catholic? Ther…

25 Things You Can Blame Muslims For

By Haroon Moghul

…Arabic numbers are called ‘Indian numbers,’ and why, in the West, ‘Indian numbers’ are called ‘Arabic numbers.’ In India they’re just known as numbers. No matter what they’re called, I think we can all agree they make life a lot easier. 2. Coffee Muslims invented coffee, and coffee is a good thing, and no good thing ever dies. At best it goes cold. In fact, one of the reasons coffee took off is because religious Muslims preferred the beverage for…