Religion Dispatches
…s of matter, culture, and energy. The next project will therefore ask what it means to call the creativity internal to our complex, symbiotic multiverse “divine.” What would it mean politically, ethically, and ecologically to say that the cosmo- and biodiversity that constantly brings forth new worlds and forms is what we mean by “God”?…
Read More
…ibiting churches with federal tax exemptions from endorsing specific political candidates. Before the final panel, we’re unexpectedly graced with the buoyant personality of Emir Caner, president of Truett McConnell University. In 2010, Emir’s brother Ergun Caner was stripped of his deanship of Liberty University Theological Seminary when it was determined that he had deliberately lied about his upbringing in a “radical Muslim family” and being tra…
Read More
…itical conservatism, and the search for online porn is a strong one. In a scatter plot indicating correlations between religiosity and Google searches for sex, conservative Mississippi ranked the highest, whereas Vermont—known to be a liberal state—clocked in with the lowest number of both Internet porn searches and religiosity. Just knowing the number of conservatives in a given state was enough information for the researchers to accurately predi…
Read More
…focus on LGBT people, and that’s a clear example, in my mind, of what the Catechism calls “unjust discrimination.” If you want to make adherence to church teaching required in terms of employment, then you would also have to fire all Protestants because they don’t believe in papal authority, all Unitarians because they don’t believe in the Trinity, all Jews because they don’t believe in Jesus, and all agnostics and atheists because they don’t bel…
Read More…ectional facilities (I wrote about a similar move with regard to public education here). There are a number of dimensions to the Florida plan but those that interest me are the plans to “privatize” the system by turning even more of it over to “faith based” prison ministries and to reshape the system as whole with a model put forth over 40 years ago by none other than RJ Rushdoony, the founder of Christian Reconstructionism. Governor Rick Scott wa…
Read More
…igious and nonreligious experience today in light of an emerging philosophical and practical in-between pointed to by the growth in the number of those who self-identify as religiously unaffiliated. Take the 36-year-old nonprofit director from Chicago who describes herself as “something like an atheist… most days.” She insists that being an unbeliever has no bearing on her almost daily prayer practice: Do I need to believe in God to say that I pra…
Read More…to me. [WG]: Good, well, I saw one summary of the book that read: “Evangelical pastor writes book denying hell, catches hell for doing so.” [RB]: What’s interesting about that is: I don’t deny hell. And in the book I clearly state: I see right now in our world greed, rape, abuse, financial scandals, I see genocide. We see hells on earth right now, so the idea that there is no hell… We see people rejecting the good and the true and the human all ar…
Read More
…ge. We are freer than the people sitting opposite us for the prosecution because we can say everything we like, and we do, but those people sitting there say only what political censorship allows them to say. They can’t speak words like “punk prayer” or “Virgin Mary, Banish Putin!” They can’t say the lines from our punk prayer that have to do with the political system. Perhaps they think it wouldn’t be a bad thing to send us to jail because we are…
Read More…no “then.” So in baboons, where males compete fiercely for mates, and some cash in and some are shut out, we can look for Trivers-Willard. Unfortunately for Williamson, we find exactly the opposite: mothers in good condition actually favor females. Because for baboons, social behavior has a stronger effect on the parenting than does the evolutionary bias predicted by Trivers-Willard. In this case, males transfer into another social group at pubert…
Read More
…igion. A case in point concerns a new study that was discussed at the American Physical Society meetings in Dallas, Texas, late last month. Religion, it seems, is going extinct. You heard me: extinct. Dead and gone. Like the dinosaurs. The data that a team of mathematicians used to reach this rather surprising conclusion were census reports of religious affiliation. Using a complicated means of mathematical analysis called “nonlinear dynamics”—com…
Read More