The Diocese of Colombia has made an urgent plea for the release of one of its priests, the Rev. Ricardo Morales Gaviria, who was abducted August 20 by outlaw militias. Update: Bishop Duque reports that the priest has been found and is safe.
Dr Barry Morgan, Archbishop of Wales conducted a debate in a bar on the subject of Is Religion Bad? in front of around 50 people, wearing his clergy collar and a sports jacket. A mixture of believers, atheists and drinkers from the bar downstairs combined to create a lively debate.
Statistics published by Amazon suggest that the number of people buying books from it about religion or spirituality has soared in three years by 50 per cent. The increase has outshone all other categories, including history, which has grown by 38 per cent, and politics, which has grown by 30 per cent.
We in the West are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.
Churches have been providing sanctuary for illegal immigrants who want to stay in the United States to be with their US born children. Immigration sweeps have mounted since congressional measures to legalize the country’s undocumented immigrants were defeated this summer. Yesterday, one activist was arrested when she left the church grounds.
All eyes seem turned towards the next date on the Anglican Communion calendar, the September meeting of the Episcopal Church House of Bishops. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the House of Bishops will meet in New Orleans. Archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola publishes his thoughts and others respond to his statement.
In recent months, there has been both good news and bad news about diversity. The bad news is that diversity can lead to social distrust. The good news is that it can mean better decisions.
Computer games are all the rage, and many have themes that should trouble parents trying to raise children who care for the world. Fortunately, there are “games with a conscience” that focus on important issues such as poverty, climate change, and energy.
Did you see the Matrix trilogy, which posited that the word we live in was a virtual reality–a clever simulation of the real thing? As strange as it may seem, an Oxford University professor, Nick Bostrom, argues that there is some significant chance that we live in the simulated virtual reality of some future human. And as crazy as it may sound, thinking through the implications of being nothing more than a computer simulations actually raises some interesting philisophical (and yes, theological) questions.
Shortly after the Rev. Zachariah Jok Char–one of Sudan’s “lost boys” who walked hundreds of miles to escape strife in that country–was ordained to the