Religion Dispatches
…ario, Jains run a number of large institutions with many employees, a high number of whom are not Jain. At some point, a number of people realize that the current system is a complicated and inefficient way to feed people, and so there are attempts at reforming the system. One of the questions that the would-be reformers have to consider is: What do most people, in fact, eat? That’s important, because they are trying to craft a system that takes i…
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…former President’s Mar-a-Lago residence, prompting bitter reactions from a number of Republicans, in some cases openly weighing political violence as a tool of reaction. Lindsey Graham predicted “riots in the streets,” should Trump be indicted, while Arizona Republican Andy Biggs and the Texas GOP compared the FBI raid to the crossing of “the Rubicon”—implying that a point of no return has been reached. The implications of the phrase are momentous…
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…rtheless put the number at roughly 338,000. I am willing to work with this number until a better one comes along. Of this number, roughly 8,000 congregations claim upwards of 1,000 members; most are smaller, indeed most are much smaller. My concept is this: I think we can create a Christian Honor Corps (CHC) of perhaps 10,000 persons. Persons like myself who take our responsibility to monitor Christian extremist thought seriously and who are willi…
Read More…st only, in most cases, at the mercy of advertising revenues. So while the number of voices has increased, the number of well-funded reporters has decreased. It’s reassuring to think that as print news takes a hit, online media will be there to fill the gap, but the story isn’t quite that simple. Content is certainly being generated, but it’s proving no easy replacement for print. Many publications weren’t initially eager to embrace the online wor…
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…to explain the bounty or harmony of the world around us. Given an infinite number of universes, a few of them are bound to be life-friendly at some point, and we’re in one of them. The problem, of course, is that the price of getting rid of God is an infinite number of universes we can’t see. So sober-minded contemporary scientists end up on the same side as (some) theologians in arguing that the multiverse is extravagant, unnecessary, and unscien…
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…st, 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 predict the extent of pornography searches using key words including sex, gay sex, porn, free porn, XXX, and gay porn. These findings held true even after the researchers controlled for other demographic va…
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…n’t measure it. But it doesn’t really matter. The psychiatrist’s job is to help the person who’s suffering, however you have to deal with that, whatever terms you have to meet the person on to help them [with their] suffering is where you come in to meet them. Is there a way to discuss culturally constructed diseases without stigmatizing or delegitimizing the experiences of the people who are being afflicted? One example I can think of is Dissocia…
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…eligion and culture without pissing off someone. My real motivation was to help sports fans understand why they’re seeing so much Christianity in the game, whether it’s something they like or dislike. I wanted to frame the issue and make some sense of it. I observe a lot of visceral, knee-jerk reaction to religion in the game—vigorous defenses of it and attacks against it—but not a lot of thoughtful or nuanced thinking about what’s good and legiti…
Read MoreWith the Newt Gingrich surge still in its rosy dawning hours, and in the wake of a debate made most memorable by an aggressively wooden one-liner involving a $10,000 bet and Rick Perry, people who are kind of rooting for Mitt Romney (and kind of rooting is as good as he’s polling these days) are suggesting that candidate Romney should start talking about his Mormonism as a means of seeming, well, more human. All along, the conventional wisdom has…
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…promoting botanical diversity and churning up the dirt. In doing so, they helped the permafrost stay frozen, instead of releasing its enormous stores of trapped CO2 into the air. It’s possible, writes Shapiro, that mammoths would “actually slow the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere, and therefore the rate of global warming.” The considerations go beyond cost-benefit analysis, though, and to questions of culpability and ob…
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