Religion Dispatches
…icists like Whitestone and Lederman doing the talking) we seem to revert to talk of magic and wizardry. I suspect that this isn’t merely a matter of scientists talking down to a lay audience, but is a sign of the utility that these supernatural concepts still maintain (even for physicists) for some of those very features of our universe that science has supposedly laid bare….
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…the unfolding of God’s plan but the unfolding of an evolutionary form of design. So I’m not a triumphant atheist, and never have been. To disavow religion, or to think of it as nonsense is just a non-starter, from my position. Many of the people I like reading most are religious authors: Pascal, Augustine, Paul. I’m occasionally mystified by the moves they make. But philosophy without religion is a non-starter for me. The debate over whether you b…
Read More…o judge our lives on what Jesus said he brings to us, then struggling is a sign that we aren’t in it. Abundance—as in an abundance of joy, compassion, love, peace, justice and all the other things Jesus prattled on about—would mark how our lives are supposed to be going. The moment I gave up “struggling” and stopped seeing my sexual orientation as “baggage” was the moment I experienced abundance, in spades. The struggle stopped. God does not give…
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…g Benjamin, taught the people at the temple (see Jacob 1:17; Mosiah 1:18). Significantly, when the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ appeared to the Nephites in A.D. 34, He came to the temple (see 3 Nephi 11:1–11). The Prophet Joseph Smith taught, “The Church is not fully organized, in its proper order, and cannot be, until the Temple is completed, where places will be provided for the administration of the ordinances of the Priesthood.” The LDS.org w…
Read More…which receives millions in federal funds, and requires all US employees to sign its Christian Statement of Faith and/or The Apostles Creed. World Vision’s president, Richard Stearns, has been an outspoken critic of ending what is euphemistically known as “co-religionist hiring,” and has a coalition of conservative faith-based advocates backing him. After Obama pledged on the campaign trail in 2008 to reverse the Bush policy, evangelicals were up i…
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…with the other. Is it an underlying straight assumption about wealth as a sign of masculine virility? Oh, that’s an excellent idea… I have two theories: One is the great dialectic in American culture between Jesus the meek and humble lamb and Jesus the warrior, the man’s man. In other words, is it the Jesus who appeals to the effeminate preachers and their female flock or the Billy Sunday-Billy Graham [version represented today by] Tony Evans? He…
Read More…act that scientists themselves are using this vocabulary, he argues, “is a sign of the utility that these supernatural concepts still maintain” for describing our universe. The use of supernatural concepts to describe the Higgs boson has been hotly debated ever since CERN’s announcement. Over at io9, Dave Goldberg makes all the best arguments against it. The “God Particle” was coined by Leon Lederman in a book detailing how essential the Higgs is…
Read More…ey’re gravely concerned about Israeli policies in (choose your political designation) the West Bank/the Occupied Territories/Occupied Palestine, but they’re also aware that the situation is extraordinarily complex, and that they risk alienating Jewish allies—and even engaging in anti-Semitism—if they misspeak or misstep. Activists, meanwhile, are shrill. Right-wing “pro-Israel” activists decry any criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic, while left-wi…
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…. In some quarters the letter was treated as a reversal of position—even a sign of bad faith, or that the bishops had gotten to Sister Keehan and reeled her in. It would be fairer to take the letter at face value, as an acknowledgement that on close examination Obama’s suggested accommodation simply would not work—a reasonable conclusion given the self insurance issue and that it is still not clear whether the insurance companies would pick up the…
Read More…rprised: When they opened their mosque and community center in 2007, their sign was torched…That’s a lot of open cases in a town as small as Joplin.” ”I do not believe the arsonist acted alone, or in a vacuum,” Campbell says. “The perpetrator has bragged somewhere, in a bar, at work, at—yes!—church. And while Joplin residents would do well to hold a vigil and take up a collection to help their Muslim neighbors rebuild, the best thing would be to t…
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