Giles Frasier says in The Independent on Sunday that Archbishop Rowan Williams has been too compliant in the face of the Church’s conservatives and homophobes. The time has come to confront the extremists who would fight the battles of 17th century in the 21st.
If you have traveled around the world or even if you have read National Geographic from time to time, you know that there are two basic kinds of yokes that can be used to bear burdens: single ones and shared ones. The single ones are very efficient.
Douglas Kmiec is the kind of Catholic voter the G.O.P. usually doesn’t have to think twice about. The Pepperdine law professor and former Reagan Justice Department lawyer (Samuel Alito was an office mate) attends Mass each morning. He has actively opposed abortion for most of his adult life, working with crisis pregnancy centers to persuade women not to undergo the procedure. He is also a vocal supporter of Barack Obama. Kmiec made waves in the Catholic world in late March when he endorsed the Democratic candidate.
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.