Religion Dispatches
…it’s also worth using some caution in understanding its significance and impact. While his campaign is trying to create an aura of evangelical inevitability, the WORLD magazine (unscientific) survey of evangelical leaders, for example, still shows Cruz running behind Marco Rubio for support among evangelical elites. Although the Texas meeting was off the record, the big names who were revealed are of the type that have strong name recognition amon…
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…” crowd in the West are self-proclaimed ecologists or naturalists. A large number of atheists and agnostics are deeply passionate about ecological ethics, or how we might be more “in tune” with nature. Culturally, they become fascinated in the personalities of cats and cat videos, the companionship of dogs who offer a kind of faithfulness no longer present even among the faithful. They ask about the complex emotional lives of orcas and the communi…
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…—a designation some Nones also find distasteful because it makes religious participation the basis for identification rather than… rather than what? “Even ‘agnostic’ or ‘atheist’ carry a lot of cultural baggage that I just don’t want to take on,” explained an undergraduate at a liberal arts college in Ohio who periodically joins fellow students at a Friends meeting across from campus. He reports that he prays “sometimes” when he’s faced with a dif…
Read More…entions while it went around the world basically crushing everybody in its path. And these first Christians took that military propaganda of a good news, of another city that Caesar had vanquished, and they used it to talk about Jesus, who they believed was the true Lord, who said there’s a better way to be in the world and that’s the way of sacrificial love and humble service. So if that’s what we mean by Good News, I’m all about it. [WG]: I unde…
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…g beautiful is being spoiled.” It still makes us angry and we find it very painful to watch. The lack on our part of any show of hatred or enmity has been attested by all the witnesses examined by the defence. And by the evidence of our characters. In addition to all the other character statements, I’d like you to consider the findings of the psychiatric and psychological tests the investigator ordered me to undergo in detention. The expert’s find…
Read More…ex ratios (which are notoriously noisy sets of data), but with measures of parental investment, such as “time spent with sons vs. daughters”. What they come up with is that there is, wonder of wonders, a lot of gendered cultural variation in parenting. (No! You think?) Since Trivers-Willard doesn’t even hold up in baboons, who at least meet the boundary conditions of Trivers-Willard, there is no reason to think that it ought to apply rigorously to…
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…educators or health care professionals grapple with on a daily basis? The number-crunchers are forcing us to speak their language and play their game, though they make no parallel effort to learn ours. And that is precisely what this not-so-benign linguistic analogy suggests. If “religion” (never defined) is like Quechua—and thus rapidly dying out, I take it—then who’s speaking the religious equivalent of imperial Spanish? It would seem to be the…
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…elebration in Dhaka on April 14 because Islamists had threatened to attack participants. The advocate with whom the Blade spoke on Monday said that Roopbaan was also targeted. More from Human Rights Watch: The killings follow a spate of recent targeted attacks on writers, educators, bloggers, and editors who promote liberal and secular ideas that radical groups believe are against Islam. The killings of Mannan and Mahbub brings to nine the number…
Read More…f justice is stated: the punishment must fit the crime; there must be a comparative restitution or death. Or more recently Reconstructionist (and Tea Partier) Gary DeMar wrote that restitution is the Biblical way to deal with crime: Restitution includes compensating a person for stolen or damaged property or physical harm done to someone. Restitution laws cover a variety of circumstances: assault (Exodus 21:18–19); bodily injury (21:26–27); liabil…
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…countries like Slovenia in 2012 or Croatia in 2013, where referendums were passed curtailing partnership rights for same-sex couples…. But the No camp has gotten some input from veterans of the California campaign and other marriage fights abroad. Frank Schubert, the conservative political consultant credited with the Proposition 8 victory, told BuzzFeed News before an NOM rally in Washington earlier this month that he has sent private polling, fo…
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