LSU associate professor of sociology Troy C. Blanchard recently found that a community’s religious environment — that is, the type of religious congregations within a locale — affects mortality rates, often in a positive manner.
The renaissance of Christian philosophy has been accompanied by a resurgence of interest in natural theology, that branch of theology that seeks to prove God’s existence apart from divine revelation. The goal of natural theology is to justify a broadly theistic worldview, one that is common among Christians, Jews, Muslims, and deists. While few would call them compelling proofs, all of the traditional arguments for God’s existence, not to mention some creative new arguments, find articulate defenders today.
Several of us have been trying for months to figure out how to get the voices of GLBT Africans heard at the Lambeth Conference. Getting them there physically is very difficult, because it’s hard for them to get passports and visas. So the idea for a Voices of Witness Africa video to be distributed to the bishops was born. But the film makers need your help.
This morning’s reading contains one of the great consolation passages of all time. “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden,” Jesus says, “and I will give you rest.” It is a passage you can find etched on tombstones or worked into stained glass windows or maybe even stitched in needlepoint and hung in the church parlor.
A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.
WBUR’s On Point host Jane Clayson: Science and faith aren’t at war with each other, says renowned Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant. They’re just in different
Imagine, if you will, says Lori Anne Ferrell, a professor of early modern history and literature at Claremont Graduate University, the furor that might arise if a president decided to re-edit the Bible to suit his own beliefs. That is exactly what Thomas Jefferson did: excising the miracles and inconsistencies he found within the four gospels and pasting the rest of Jesus’ “ethical teachings” into a single narrative.
Kenyan Bishop Thomas Kogo said the church had decided to forbid homosexuals from going to their churches if they could not repent and stick to biblical teachings.
The Archbishop of York, Dr. John Sentamu, has spoken out against FOCA, “accusing them of ‘ungracious’ behaviour. Dr Sentamu said he had been ‘deeply grieved’ at reports of criticism and ‘scapegoating’ by the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans of the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams,” from a news report.
A few weeks ago, the New York Post published a bit (filed under “entertainment”) about the Church of the Holy Trinity, an Episcopal Church on the Upper East Side where canine congregants are commonly in attendance. Fast forward to this week, where Huffington Post columnist Verena von Pfetten gets a kick out of the story, but digs a little deeper and discovers that this “Episcopalian” church is more than dog schtick.