The Church Times reports that the Archbishop of Canterbury preached in York Minster yesterday. Some say the sermon was both moving and a defining moment.
Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire leaves for the Lambeth Conference. He will be blogging his experiences while in England and Scotland.
The General Synod of the Church of England, meeting in York, is going to debate and perhaps decide today to move forward with allowing women to serve in the episcopate.
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.
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.
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.