Pope Benedict visited Rome’s main synagogue over the weekend. The visit comes as tensions are growing between the Vatican and Jewish leaders over the Pope’s decision to honor Pius XII by moving him closer to sainthood.
Universal concerns, not cultural values, may shape kids’ developing notions of right and wrong, writes Bruce Bowers in Science News.
There is good reason to believe four older female teachers were fired from an upper-crust Fort Lauderdale private school in a bid to replace them with younger, buxom women, a federal civil rights agency has found.
Neuroscientists argue that noble ideas such as compassion, altruism, empathy and trust are really evolutionary adaptations that are now fixed in our brains. Our moral rules are actually instinctive responses that we express in rational terms when we have to justify them
Jessa Crispin: When I read The Wrath of Angels for the first time five years ago, I had hoped it was a look back on a troubled time. The conversation around abortion then was had been no less heated than that of the book, but at least it was less bloody. Now I’m beginning to fear it simply documents the first chapter in a long story.
Now I’m reading the stories of women whom Dr. Tiller aided. While these stories don’t cancel the need for Christians to wrestle with abortion and possibly to support restrictions through legislation, the stories shake us loose from any moral high ground we thought we had reached in our own decisions—and sensitize or resensitize us to human suffering.
Worldwide, the rhetoric of homophobia recapitulates the tropes of classical Jew hatred. Gay people are seen as a subversive internal enemy with dangerous international connections. Even in places where they’ve been cowed into near invisibility, they’re viewed as having an almost occult power. They represent modernism and cosmopolitanism, the bete noirs of every type of fundamentalism.
An article by one of our regular contributors here at the Cafe, discusses the moral questions a Christian might encounter in drawing up a living
Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, economists … are putting together a novel picture of morality—a trend that University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt has described as the “new synthesis in moral psychology.” The picture emerging shows the moral sense to be the product of biologically evolved and culturally sensitive brain systems that together make up the human “moral faculty.”
Every year thousands of recently deceased people are buried not by their loved ones, but by their local council – often because they have no