Religion Dispatches
…ath, and a celebration of possibility in traditions from China to Egypt to Ethiopia. Bread is ritually important in a Judeo-Christian context, but not in Asian religious traditions; and its non-universality, writes Plate, makes bread like religion: “It has some basic ingredients…and serves certain purposes…but when we get down to the nitty-gritty of it, the similarities between traditions can be difficult to sniff out.” Telling the history of reli…
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…and predict a rise to 4 degree C. As one scientist put it, the difference between 2 degrees and 4 degrees is human civilization. Scientist James Lovelock sees humanity reduced to 500 million people within a century huddling near the North and South Poles with the rest of the planet scorched and uninhabitable. Stephen Hawkings sees our plight as hopeless and urges plans to migrate into space. Is There Any Hope? Hopeful scientists like Johann Rocks…
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…efforts by proving that children raised by intact mom-and-dad families do better than kids raised by two loving moms or dads. It won’t matter that the study didn’t do that. Blamers Also a safe bet: natural disasters like Hurricane-Superstorm Sandy will continue to be chalked up to God’s anger at the advance of gay rights. So will tragedies like the mass murder of students and educators at Sandy Hook elementary school. But those blamers will sound…
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…happiness achieve it. But there’s a tension in the natural order of things between what promotes happiness and what morality demands. Hence, unless there is a supernatural order of things bringing happiness to the morally good, the highest good is little more than a pipe dream. But reason demands that it be more than a pipe dream. And so reason demands that we posit a supernatural power. Put simply, we have to suppose that moral heroes who risk th…
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…it was logical that the women would inquire about the obvious differences between their role and status and those of men, especially as it affects their ministerial effectiveness. What surprised some people was the frankness of the discussion. The tone, perhaps more than the content, is what is new. Women expect to be taken seriously and even popes have to listen. They asked Francis about women preaching, something that deacons do. He replied tha…
Read More…k City, and Berkeley, and LA, and all those other safe blue enclaves. I’ll bet you could find a liberal campaigner talking to people about their faith in one of those areas. I’ll bet you could find a bunch. Then too, the Dems-Should-Talk-More-About-Faith narrative generally means Candidates Should Talk More About Faith, ignoring the average party members. It’s to the author’s credit that she cites Pew statistics about just how many Democrats are r…
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…Improving educator training so they can do this effectively? Absolutely. I bet more Americans would be attracted to, appreciate and consider careers in science (the number is decreasing annually). I bet we’d have more productive conversation among students and leaders of science and religion around the many profound issues in our nation that engage both: abortion, medical care, stem cells, homosexuality, and genomic research. The battle rhetoric w…
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…rse be taken with a grain of salt. That being said, I would absolutely not bet in Judge Patrick’s favor, knowing what we do about her fondness for conspiratorial and explicitly QAnon-linked “prophets” and the broader interplay between QAnon conspiracies and conservative Christian beliefs in American society. On the other hand, given the number of judges Donald Trump was able to appoint during his term as president, I wouldn’t bet the farm against…
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…in the states that are the most likely to criminalize the practice? Don’t bet on it. And certainly don’t bet on the bishops threatening to withhold communion from a politician over it. No follow-up questions, please A third trend: as many of the examples above show, anti-abortion “centrists” are a little too coy about what they’re willing to accept in order to maintain the criminalization of abortion. This is especially important to me because th…
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…criminalization of same-sex relations was removed from country’s the Penal Code in 1951. However, decriminalization alone has not ensured complete freedom for members of Jordan’s LGBT community. Article Six of the Jordanian Constitution protects citizens from discrimination on the basis of race, language or religion, but these protections do not extend to people of variant sexual identity. This gray area is where discrimination still manages to pl…
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