My faith in the Lord is about the pure, simple values: raising children right, saying grace at the table, strictly forbidding those who are Methodists or Presbyterians from receiving communion because their beliefs are heresies, and curing homosexuals. That’s all. Just the core beliefs. You won’t see me going on some frothy-mouthed tirade about being a comfort to the downtrodden.
Last Tuesday, the PBS program NOVA featured The Bible’s Buried Secrets, which focused on what both biblical scholarship and archeology tell us about the events described in the Hebrew Bible. It is safe to say that biblical literalists will hate the program. Most prominent biblical scholars, however, had only praise for the program. It broke no new ground, but fairly described the state of the scholarship.
The precise location of Herod’s tomb remained a mystery for nearly two millennia, until April 2007, when Netzer and his colleagues at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem unearthed it on the upper slopes of Herodium. The discovery provided new insights into one of the most enigmatic minds of the ancient world—and fresh evidence of the hatred that Herod excited among his contemporaries.
Physicists don’t like coincidences. They like even less the notion that life is somehow central to the universe, and yet recent discoveries are forcing them to confront that very idea. Life, it seems, is not an incidental component of the universe, burped up out of a random chemical brew on a lonely planet to endure for a few fleeting ticks of the cosmic clock. In some strange sense, it appears that we are not adapted to the universe; the universe is adapted to us.
General Theological Seminary in New York has successfully installed seven geothermal wells, with 15 more slated for installation. These wells will replace the fuel oil heating system and reduce the seminary’s carbon footprint significantly. But the red tape surrounding the green project has been a nightmare.
Facebook and other online platforms are becoming more prevalent in American religious culture. Religion and Ethics Newsweekly (complete with a shiny new web design) looks at the phenomenon with a particular focus on a Boston pastor’s challenge to his congregation to live by the rules of Leviticus for a month and then blog about it at their Facebook group and then looks at the pluses and minuses of online religion.
Never before, say historians, has there been this much attention on what church the president-elect will attend. As a follow-up to Time’s asking the “which church” question, today the Washington Post also examines the phenomenon of churches trying to “maneuver themselves to attract the nation’s first African American president and his family to their house of worship.”
On November 4, Proposition 8 passed in California, enshrining in the state constitution a ban on same sex marriage. Similar amendments also passed in Florida and Arizona. We have now lost campaigns like this in 29 states; we have won only once – in Arizona in 2006. On a human level, these defeats are a blow to people across the nation who care about civil rights and equality. On a strategic level, they are explicable; after all, we continue to rely on the same strategies despite mounting evidence that they do not work.
How is death defined in other religions? Usually, the same way it has traditionally been defined in all cultures: by a lack of vital signs. Most world religions lack a clear doctrinal statement that certifies when, exactly, the moment of death can be said to have occurred.
Charles Darwin is often identified both by atheists and some Christians alike as an enemy of the faith. Andrew Brown argues otherwise. He notes that scientific challenges to literalism were already overwhelming before Darwin wrote his texts, and that Darwin’s evolution may offer an answer to the problem of evil in the world.