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Category Archives: Religion
Identity Markets and Identity Theft
On April 27, 2011, The New York Times carried a story about atheists campaigning to have their own chaplaincy in the American military. The campaign is led by an organization called Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers. Jason Torpy, its … Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Identity, Religion, Secularism
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The Church as a Forum
Bad Boll is a village in Wuerttemberg, in the southwest of Germany. It is located in the so-called Swabian Alps, a landscape of gentle hills and modest forests, as averse to drama as the proverbially sober regional culture. Yet this … Continue reading
Posted in Philosophy, Religion, Sociology
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Religion in the Military
There were two stories about the military chaplaincy in the February 8, 2011 issue of The Christian Century. The first dealt with the disproportional representation of Evangelicals among chaplains today—33%, while the number of soldiers belonging to Evangelical churches is … Continue reading
Posted in Military, Religion, Secularism
8 Comments
Do extraterrestrial aliens have original sin?
In its issue of January 7, 2011, the National Catholic Reporter had an interview with Douglas Vakoch, a psychologist who is “director of interstellar message composition” at the SETI Institute (a job description prone to produce ecstasy in any teenage … Continue reading
Posted in Religion
11 Comments
Am I My DNA?
On November 28, 2010, the National Catholic Reporter, the banner journal of liberal Catholicism, published a lengthy excerpt from a forthcoming book, The Social Mission of the U.S. Catholic Church, by Father Charles Curran. As the NCR editorial on that … Continue reading
Posted in Catholicism, Morality, Religion
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Defanging the Supernatural
On November 13, 2010, there were two stories about religion, separated by four pages, in The New York Times. The first, filed by Laurie Goodstein (who reports regularly on religion), dealt with a conference of Roman Catholic bishops on procedures … Continue reading
Posted in Religion, Sociology, Supernatural, Uncategorized
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Bloody Borders
In the book which has by now become an important point of reference, The Clash of Civilizations (1996), the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington developed the thesis that after the demise of the Cold War conflicts would be between … Continue reading
Posted in Inter-faith Dialogue, Islam, Religion
5 Comments
A Centennial not much Noticed
I don’t know what occurs to the average newspaper reader if one observes that 2010 marks a centennial. Whatever happened in 1910? Some international incident anticipating World War I? A revolution in China? As I’ve just discovered, the first congress … Continue reading
Posted in Christianity, Inter-faith Dialogue, Religion
2 Comments
Proposing a Cosmic Christ
On August 26 Raimon Panikkar died at age 91, in a village near Barcelona, the city in which he was raised. There have been obituaries in both the religious and the secular press. I read a fairly extensive one in … Continue reading
Posted in Hinduism, Inter-faith Dialogue, Religion, Sociology
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Another Limit to Freedom of Speech
The Supreme Court this week heard a case which raises the issue of possible limits to the freedom of speech in the sharpest possible way. I had not been aware of this case until I first read about it last … Continue reading
Posted in Morality, Religion, Secularism, United States
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