Religion Dispatches
…ll the same. The clinic nurse I was shadowing that day attributed the high number, at least in part, to truck drivers sitting in their cabs in the gravel lot down the road waiting to clear customs. If we extrapolate that number out to the village as a whole and assume that over one-third of the women in this small town in rural Zambia are HIV-positive, the enormity of the HIV pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa becomes clearer. What intricate, invisibl…
Read More…—income factors that may have made low-cost clinics more appealing, or the number of abortion clinics in the U.S. and how that has changed over the time period in question, or the possibility that people in private practice would rather not perform abortions for any number of possible reasons, including threats on their lives—you’d be left unsatisfied. Likewise, the report expresses grave concern over the fact that the very same clinics that see…
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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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…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…
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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…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…
Read More…Christ of Latter-day Saints, it’s pretty safe to assume that a significant number of “Concerned Citizens of the United States” are Mormon. But so too are a significant number of undocumented immigrants living in the American West. As we’ve reported here at RD, the Church’s strongest growth over the last decade has been among Latino populations, and almost 4.5 million Mormons worldwide are Spanish-speaking. Economic downtimes and anti-immigrant out…
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…he gives us his biblical worldview spin: the person who’s right about the number is the person who knows who made the number and for what purpose. Neither person in the meme can know the truth of whether it’s a six or a nine until the author of the meme tells them. In other words, while there might be many worldviews, only God can truly tell us the truth of the world. Thus the only worldview that’s correct is the one that acknowledges God made th…
Read More…years, Ireland is no longer “the most Catholic country in the world.” The number of Irish who attend church every week has dropped from 90 percent to 30 percent. Kennedy spoke with a college professor who stopped going to church after the scandals broke; “when she cast her vote in favor of same-sex marriage, she says she was voting against the Catholic Church.” Kennedy also spoke with Dublin’s Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, who she says “admits he’s…
Read More…36 benchmarks show significant advances, including sharp increases in the number of LGBT Americans protected by nondiscrimination and family recognition legislation at the state level. Less than one quarter of the indicators are negative, and four metrics show little change (either positive or negative). The report shows that an increasing number of people believe homosexuality to be morally acceptable (49% in 2009, up from 40% in 2000), and whil…
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