Religion Dispatches
…nderstanding of the complex make-up and nature of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state—including its many internal challenges. What I found most fascinating, however, were the categories “People of Jewish background” and “People with a Jewish affinity.” The first includes those “who have a Jewish parent or were raised Jewish but identify with a religion other than Judaism.” In contrast, “People with a Jewish affinity” are those with no Jewish p…
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…elief fails, pushing people to further anger and the search for a fix. The most common features of the fix that doesn’t fix are acknowledgment that one is wronged and right to fight back. This is usually accurate; people know when they’re getting screwed. Yet when the causes are intricate and overwhelming, “quick-fixes” seek targets that soothe in their simplicity: targets that are identifiable, isolatable, and already a bit alien or illicit. They…
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…an water, and healthcare. Even during the Mughal era, violence was not the most common means of converting Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains to Islam. Instead, it was the jizya, the tax levied on non-Muslims, that over time won the most converts, and those conversions happened across caste lines. The re-introduction of Christianity by the Portuguese to India’s west coast (where Syrian Christians had lived since the time of St. Thomas) in the 15th centu…
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…oo closely identified with a specific party. And, as political scientist Timothy Byrnes writes in the journal OMG!, no religious institution is in more peril of losing its soul to politics than the U.S. Catholic Church. (Unlike many evangelicals, who at this point appear to have little soul left to loose given their die-hard support of Trump). The culprit, of course, is abortion. The U.S. bishops’ long-term insistence that “all other moral evils p…
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…e “Why did God make me ugly?” and 103 ask “Why did God make me black?” The most common God-related question, asked over 25,000 times per month in the US, is “Who created God?,” followed by that old Job-ian classic, “Why does God allow suffering?” But we should be careful here; Google search data offers a skewed sliver of insight into the full range of human motivation and behavior. The population of people who ask Google about God may not be refle…
Read More…gious fundamentalism, intolerance and hate that places this country as the most homophobic one of the region,” Somos Gay, a Paraguayan gay rights group, said in a statement. It added that “this situation has an impact on 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…
Read More…f conspiracy, negligence, misrepresentation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. On May 17, however, Maryland Circuit Court Judge Sharon V. Burrell dismissed most of the suit on the grounds of statute of limitations: under state law, civil charges must be brought in many cases of child abuse within three years of the victim turning 18. If Burrell’s ruling stands, only the two remaining plaintiffs who are under 21 (both of whom are fro…
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…en studied, and at least 12 were formally approved as of 2008—according to most numbers (although even a simple count of “official” sites is hard to obtain), Our Lady of Good Help is the 13th. Pope Benedict XVI recently called for more moderation in approving such sites, but any new regulations did not fall into place in time to stop Bishop Ricken from pushing Adele Brise into the international spotlight. Benedict probably doesn’t have to worry ab…
Read More…Valley Retreat for a Warrior Sweat which was scheduled to last for two or more hours. More than fifty “grandfather stones” were brought into the sweat lodge and by the end of the ordeal two were dead, one more would die without recovering consciousness, and fifteen were reported to be suffering ill effects. In spite of the number of people who experienced difficulties during each of the eight fifteen-minute rounds, Ray contends he did not know th…
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…form of the vituperative opposition to the First Amendment right to build mosques, most visibly in Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer’s “Stop the Islamization of America” crusade launched to prevent the building of the Park51 community center in New York, as well as in blatant public displays of anti-Muslim bigotry. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who at the time was slated to be the leader of Park51, was, and still is, routinely portrayed as a covert radi…
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