Religion Dispatches
…smaller brains” (Houston Chronicle) In fact, that’s a somewhat selective list of stories on the findings of a highly selective study. Involving less than three hundred people, the study looked at the brain volume of a group of people it divvied up according to religious affiliation (Protestant, Catholic, “born again” and unaffiliated). (Un)born again Protestants apparently won the brain volume prize. Bracketing the question of who devises studi…
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…, eating, making bad puns. When he was gone, did they first remember his list of religious instructions? Did they remember his debating points against his adversaries? Eventually they remembered these things. But first they remembered the Good Shepherd. Archaeology shows that long before the cross became the symbol of the church, his symbol was the picture of the shepherd with the lost lamb wrapped over his shoulders. His words were remembered,…
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…ngly proving to be critical to successful progressive advocacy.” Other panelists include Elizabeth Denlinger, Director of Campaigns at Sojourners, which her biography describes as “one of the largest networks of progressive Christians in the nation,” a characterization some progressive Christians take issue with. (I’m also speaking on a different panel at the same conference.) Eleison and the AVN are focused on making “people of faith” “comfortabl…
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…sumably, not just to get atheists to be liked. Among other things, it’s to promote critical reasoning; it’s to advance the view that faith is decidedly not a virtue. Calling our worldview a faith does not seem the best way to achieve these objectives.” Unsurprisingly, the thought that interfaith work requires significant tongue-biting makes many atheists very uncomfortable; it was certainly a concern I had before I started working in the interfait…
Read More…f abortion coverage from private insurance, to name several of the growing list of restrictions at the state level. Because the anti-choice base will want to hear a rah-rah for all of that, but moderate general election voters may well be appalled by the prospect of, say, the state deciding that a woman facing a complicated pregnancy that puts her health at grave risk must carry that pregnancy to term. In 2003, Pawlenty signed in to law the Woman’…
Read More…f internet technological and capacity innovation before the advent of the smart phone. And if we want to start a serious conversation about where presidential candidates get their money and how ethical that money is, let’s do it. I have a laundry list of labor, environmental, feminist, and human rights issues with multinational corporations I’d love to start working through. But don’t give me a thin, opportunistic connect-the-Mormon-dots story a…
Read More…iana. Well, last week, the Foundation for Thought and Ethics appeared on a list of publishers who plan to submit supplementary materials for review this spring by the Texas Board of Education for its science curriculum. So what is the Foundation for Thought and Ethics? The same folks who published Pandas and People, the intelligent design textbook that was featured so prominently in the trial of Kitzmiller v. Dover five years ago. These were the s…
Read More…to call upon Allah, “the names come back to you as if you are reading the list upon a script.” She held her hands shoulder high, palms up to the heavens in the Muslim position of supplication. I could “see” what she meant, then and there, and I stopped worrying that I would make a promise and then forget this unnamed woman and her three children. I’ve collected stories from the hajj experience for many many years. Now I prepare to have my own to…
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…at in the context of grinding oppression, the most miraculous item in this list is that the poor are learning that God has good news for them.) And then there is the radical nonviolence. Jesus is certainly among the great axial age figures who invites us to explore and apply the immense power of nonviolent direct action. Crossan teaches that failing to put equal emphasis on both terms in “nonviolent revolutionary” completely misses what Jesus was…
Read More…king and logistical preparations, I must begin to make amends. Actually my list is not that long, once I contact my immediate family. This harks back to two things, in “making the will before hajj” one is also making plans for some kind of finality. If not physically then at least metaphorically. That is probably why so many people actually wish to die at hajj. This is the place and time where one’s life should come before one’s eyes and then wash…
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