Religion Dispatches
…ir parents. My brother married a wonderful woman that my parents found for him, while I (the daughter) traveled to the United States and married an American. Naturally, that afternoon, I gave up every attempt to jot notes for the public lecture I was preparing. I dedicated myself to studiously being the weird woman eavesdropping on the baristas’ conversation. So I had to deal with mixed feelings as I listened to the two young people disagree with…
Read More…ans and 50 percent of the general population identified as “pro-life”; the number of Americans who identified as “pro-choice” hit a record low. But respondents’ opinions on policy issues around abortion had not drastically changed from previous years. Just over half of Americans think abortion should be “legal under certain” circumstances, only 2 percent more people than last year. Meanwhile, 25 percent of Americans (compared to 27 percent in 2011…
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…e know what happened to Walter Scott is because a bystander filmed it with his phone. In making his plea, Pinckney invoked the biblical story of Doubting Thomas, the one of Jesus’s disciples who would not believe Jesus had risen from the dead until he saw him with his own eyes and touched his wounds with his own hands. “It was only when he was able to do that, he said, ‘I believe,’” Pinckney said of Thomas. Some people, said Pinckney, are like Tho…
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…als, seems to extend from thirty- and forty-year-olds to their twenty-something children. The Millennials study, too, highlighted an overall decline in religious affiliation, but showed religiously-affiliated Millennials as having an intensity of religious commitment as strong that of as pre-Boomer believers. Likewise, the study showed young adult believers as “fairly traditional in their religious beliefs and practices.” What is different, howeve…
Read More…rs. Even the telephone could not conceal the countenance of disbelief upon his brow as his measured voice repeated the mantra, “I never would have thought….I never would have thought.” My mother, who the night of Martin Luther King’s assassination fielded celebratory calls as a telephone operator in Memphis, Tennessee, telephoned us to awake my four-year-old twins from their sleep. Through her sniffles and giggles, this loving grandmother and now…
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…a valuable practice in any religious tradition. One should be inspecting this thing that we do because it’s a thing that we are creating. It’s a thing that we are doing. Our systems of belief can tell us that these practices come from God or that they are given over to humanity on the top of a mountain, but ultimately in our day to day lives, we are actively creating these religious practices, they are alive and they are vibrant, and they are imm…
Read More…the time. His mother, poor, ill, and struggling with drugs and booze, lost him and his sister to the county some time later. I doubt very much that as she sank into the arms of addiction that she took notice of one election after another, of one economic setback after another, of torture and Katrina and corruption and the undermining of civil liberties. I am sure that she had no idea that Democrat after Democrat was reviled as weak on terror; that…
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…ate that was missing. Sort of an attitude of “you guys can’t explain everything, we can tidy this up for you.” Exactly. In the 1950s, geologists at the time were really struggling to put together plate tectonics. So The Genesis Flood was critiquing a “beta version” of modern geology. That was part of their motivations, Morris and Whitcomb realized the shortcomings of what was out there, and they teed up off of that. They went off on an irrational…
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…d straightforward. In brief, the Church continues to allow cremation, something which has been permitted since 1963, but clarified first that burial of the body is preferred over cremation, and second that in the case of cremation, scattering of the ashes, or keeping the remains in a private or domestic setting is strictly forbidden. “It is not permitted to scatter the ashes of the faithful departed in the air, on land, at sea or in some other way…
Read More…very deep pathology on his part. His love of the media spotlight may cost him his wife and children, yet he continues to use them as a shield to hide his failings. Ginger White’s claims, backed up with receipts and phone records, are compelling. Besides, who would willingly admit that they had sex with THEHermanCain, besides Gloria, his wife, unless it was true. I sincerely hope that Cain gets a clue this week and drops out of the race for the sa…
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