Religion Dispatches
…g Burma’s Rohingya minority has been purposely aggravated by the fanatical monk U Wirathu and his “969 Movement.”) In his book An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics, Peter Harvey chalks these seeming inconsistencies between Buddhist peacefulness in theory and practice up to “unresolved human fears and attachments aggravated by politically unstable times.” But whatever the reasons, this much is clear: the role of Buddhists and Buddhism in violence and…
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…%). When Coney Barrett was nominated in September of 2020, Trump’s polling numbers among white evangelicals had dipped to a low of 55% in August 2020. However, once her nomination was made public that number rose to the normal average of 71%. Coney Barrett’s record on reproductive rights was a central issue in her confirmation hearings, as Anna North points out at Vox: Barrett, a Catholic and member of the religious group People of Praise, has als…
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…ong a swing vote (Catholics) and perhaps even their base (Evangelicals and Mormons). That’s a real possibility: Hillary Clinton is a uniquely controversial candidate. A Democratic nominee more acceptable to Evangelical women matched up against a Trumpist candidate could turn today’s 66% Evangelical support into 2024’s 55%—or worse. If 2016 has taught us nothing else, of course, it’s that anything could happen. Even as I wrote this post, FBI Direct…
Read More…ther moves toward greater diversity in the military—as in the case of racial and LGBT quality—it will likely have significant impact on the American culture more broadly as service members move back and forth between military and civilian life….
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…evolutionary psychology. The humanists and sociologists have moved toward more and more granular snapshots of religious life, leaving behind the old, sweeping Religion is x, y, and z formulations that defined the good old days, when a dude in an office at Oxford could comfortably sketch out a theory of ritual based on secondhand ethnographies from remote tropical islands. Meanwhile, the social and evolutionary psychologists seem to be flying full…
Read More…percent still opposed marriage equality, while 60 percent of those with a more moderate view of their religion supported it. Despite the Pope’s strong opposition to all things gay, Catholics support gay marriage by 48 percent, compared to 33 percent of Protestants. Overall, in a different Gallup survey, those saying gays and lesbians are “morally acceptable” stands at 52 percent. Barely 34 percent thought so back in 1982. The trend among Christia…
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…a small brain then you’re more likely to be born again, and if you have a more active brain then you’re more likely to be a Buddhist. Those are pretty strange claims, too. They echo claims made by the now-suspect 19th century science of Phrenology. The idea there was that by studying the human head—its size, shape, and general morphology—you could tell a lot about the intelligence and even the moral character of the person under consideration….
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…fashion designers to cell biologists to shepherds shown pictures of sheep among other animals. At most, Calvert’s experiments seem to show a correlation between visual attention and past experience: if you have spent a good deal of time studying something in the past, then you spend relatively more mental energy looking at it compared to other objects. How, then, do she and Riley conclude that Apple is exploiting parts of the brain that evolved t…
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…the National Review Board published a handbook for diocesan boards? What’s more, review-board members aren’t always clear on what amounts to sexual abuse. Does plying a minor with alcohol count? What about inappropriate tickling? The Charter sets the standard as “an offense by a cleric against the Sixth Commandment of the Decalogue with a minor”—the one about adultery. That definition is vague enough to allow review boards to recommend actions aga…
Read More…oblems.” Seriously. Setting that kind of tone will probably only encourage more and more absurd statements. The recent post on Jesus seems especially insensitive, considering who it is being directed to and where it is apparently originating. A number of Palestinians are Christians, and that Christianity is of course traced back to the time of Jesus himself. The Palestinian weekend is Friday and Sunday. In addition to being the world’s most annoyi…
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