It’s very disconcerting to be in church and have the officiant order everyone to sit down, in the same tone of voice we in the West use to command a dog to sit. Or to be talking to one person, have another walk up and demand – demand – that you stop what you’re doing to greet them. (And if you don’t, be prepared to be lightly punched. Or to have a hand suddenly reach across your face to get your attention.)
Matthew was exactly the kind of person that Zealots regarded as the scum of the earth. It is easy to imagine that Simon [the Zealot, also one of the twelve disciples] would have gladly killed Matthew with his little curved knife before Jesus came into his life.
Top faith surrogates will hit the trail for Obama. Some of those high profile figures include Former Indiana Congressman and pro-life Democrat Tim Roemer, Catholic legal scholar Doug Kmiec, and author Donald Miller.
Storytelling is one of the few human traits that are truly universal across culture and through all of known history. Anthropologists find evidence of folktales everywhere in ancient cultures, written in Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Chinese, Egyptian and Sumerian. People in societies of all types weave narratives, from oral storytellers in hunter-gatherer tribes to the millions of writers churning out books, television shows and movies. And when a characteristic behavior shows up in so many different societies, researchers pay attention: its roots may tell us something about our evolutionary past.
On Monday, Christians on Wall Street set up special prayer meetings for the week. First came the special prayer conference calls on Monday and Tuesday nights. Then, starting Wednesday, extraordinary prayer meetings were scheduled at Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Deloitte, and elsewhere. Pastors began planning to gather for a sidewalk prayer meeting outside of the stock exchange.
by John Holliger
Let’s grant that science and religion are not incompatible—there are after all some (though not many) excellent scientists, like Charles Townes and Francis Collins, who have strong religious beliefs. Still, I think that between science and religion there is, if not an incompatibility, at least what the philosopher Susan Haack has called a tension, that has been gradually weakening serious religious belief, especially in the West, where science has been most advanced.
The most curious thing about this parable [of the vineyard owner and his workers] for me is where we locate ourselves in line. The story sounds quite different from the end of the line, after all, than it does from the front of the line, but isn’t it interesting that 99 percent of us hear it from front row seats?
Today in reactions to the HoB vote of Friday, we have several reports–not so much of reactions as explanations of “why I voted the way I did.” The reports indicate that the conversation was respectful and that there was an undercurrent of sadness throughout the proceeding.
Tony Blair, as Howland Distinguished Fellow at Yale University, “officially” kicked off his teaching career yesterday with an address and question & answer session to some 2,000 students at Yale’s Woolsey Hall. His engaging style and sense of humor were apparent in the forum, which sets the stage for the Faith and Globalization Initiative. Blair also is teaching a course on faith and globalization as part of the initiative, which is “a three-year collaboration among Yale’s Divinity School, the School of Management and Blair’s own Tony Blair Faith Foundation,’ according to the Hartford Courant.