Religion Dispatches
…s experience; stack two is for those seeking to demystify religious experiences with science. Whether you prefer neurotheology or CSR, any attempt to pin down religious parts of the brain faces the same obstacle: the human brain is inordinately complex, and deceptively complicated. This is, in part, because it was not designed by an engineer with a master plan, but rather by hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary tinkering. Over the last…
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…tions against priests for a range of abusive acts, but it’s also too idiosyncratic to be of much use to review boards. They need more guidance. Third, require that all allegations be forwarded immediately to review boards. In many dioceses, such as Brooklyn, every allegation goes to the review board. In Philadelphia, however, someone with the archdiocese had been pre-screening accusations, deciding which were worthy of the review board’s conside…
Read More…iday) and Christian (Sunday). Why would Christian Palestinians want to “lynch” Jesus? Or perhaps the embassy’s unknown provocateur meant to suggest the overwhelming majority of Palestinians, who are Muslims, would “lynch” Jesus Christ. This, too, is an astonishing assertion. There is no school of Islam that does not honor and revere Jesus Christ as a Prophet, as the Word and Spirit of God; moreover, Muslims revere Jesus as the Messiah who is fore…
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…en’t Jewish by religion, yet consider themselves Jewish. Reasons for this include the fact that Jesus was Jewish, because of Jewish ancestry generations ago, a Jewish spouse, Jewish friends etc. In terms of numbers, Jews by religion or no religion make up 2.2% of the U.S. population, but if you add “People with a Jewish affinity” it rises to 2.7%, so that this category of people who are not considered Jews by the Jewish community but identify as J…
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…e class, once the largest, is the majority no longer; median middle class income has dropped 4% since 2000; four middle income jobs that accounted for 60% of employment in 1979 accounted for only 46% by 2012; and the number of persons not in the labor force is growing. While some are getting richer, the numbers tell us, middle income earners are hobbled by shrinking purchasing power, disappearing job opportunities, and increasingly out-of-reach ed…
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…imes. Moreover, aggressive proselytizing by Christian groups has actually increased, including attempts at converting Hindu temple-goers right outside the temple doors. To be sure, from a distance, it would appear that India’s religious minorities might suffocate from the weight of a nearly 80 percent Hindu population. But Hindu majoritarianism in India isn’t just a myth—it’s a practical impossibility because of the religion’s decentralized nature…
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…plicit support for a candidate who didn’t just hold positions that Pope Francis had called inconsistent with fundamental teachings of Christianity, but for a candidate who based his entire candidacy and his entire electoral appeal precisely on those “un-Christian” positions. And Byrnes notes the ways in which the bishops helped radicalize white Catholics to be favorable to Trump—which they were, with 60 percent backing him despite all-but-explicit…
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…eep reduction in “Google searches for churches,” yet more evidence of the increasing number of “nones,” or that “searches related to the Bible, God, Jesus Christ, church and prayer are all highly concentrated in the Bible Belt. They rise on Sunday everywhere.” Other patterns are more jarring: “Relative to the rest of the country, for every search I looked at, retirement communities search more about hell,” he writes. Each month, on average, 422 pe…
Read More…human lives. Hate crimes, bullying and violence are the disastrous consequences of this encouragement of homophobia.” Servin notes that President Horacio Cartes, months before his 2013 election, “compared gay people to monkeys and said he would rather shoot himself in the testicles before his son married a man.” Romania: Report on ‘traditional values’ alliance with U.S. groups to oppose LGBT rights Sian Norris reports for Open Democracy’s 50.50 on…
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…ted the mainstreaming of strains of Catholicism ranging from the entire Franciscan order (St. Francis started his career as something of a controversial rogue) to veneration of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Latin America (a single goatherd saw her in the hills in 1531). The Basilica at Guadalupe is now a site that draws over 10 million visitors per year, making it the second-most visited church in the world after the Vatican. Drawing the Line at Cani…
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