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A free floating commentary on culture, politics, economics, and religion based on a passionate commitment to the truth and a desire graciously to refute that which is contrary to it….
"He must hold firm to the sure word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to confute those who contradict it."
--Titus 1:9, Revised Standard Version
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Protestant and Catholic women in the United States have grown unhappier since stores have stayed open on Sundays, according to a study by economists from Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Chicago’s DePaul University.
The study found that the repeal of “blue law” restrictions on Sunday shopping has corresponded with lower church attendance for white women. Meanwhile, the probability of women becoming unhappy increased by 17 percent.
Read it all.
The study found that the repeal of “blue law” restrictions on Sunday shopping has corresponded with lower church attendance for white women. Meanwhile, the probability of women becoming unhappy increased by 17 percent.
Read it all.
Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • Women
The Enlightenment-derived worldview that gave rise to the great murder ideologies of the last century remains very much alive. Its language is softer, its intentions seem kinder, and its face is friendlier. But its underlying impulse hasn’t changed -- i.e., the dream of building a society apart from God; a world where men and women might live wholly sufficient unto themselves, satisfying their needs and desires through their own ingenuity.
This vision presumes a frankly “post-Christian” world ruled by rationality, technology and good social engineering. Religion has a place in this worldview, but only as an individual lifestyle accessory. People are free to worship and believe whatever they want, so long as they keep their beliefs to themselves and do not presume to intrude their religious idiosyncrasies on the workings of government, the economy, or culture.
Now, at first hearing, this might sound like a reasonable way to organize a modern society that includes a wide range of ethnic, religious and cultural traditions, different philosophies of life and approaches to living.
But we’re immediately struck by two unpleasant details....
Read it all.
This vision presumes a frankly “post-Christian” world ruled by rationality, technology and good social engineering. Religion has a place in this worldview, but only as an individual lifestyle accessory. People are free to worship and believe whatever they want, so long as they keep their beliefs to themselves and do not presume to intrude their religious idiosyncrasies on the workings of government, the economy, or culture.
Now, at first hearing, this might sound like a reasonable way to organize a modern society that includes a wide range of ethnic, religious and cultural traditions, different philosophies of life and approaches to living.
But we’re immediately struck by two unpleasant details....
Read it all.
Filed under: * Culture-Watch • History • Philosophy • Religion & Culture • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Roman Catholic
Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi, who holds increasing sway in the Italian economy, upset some Italians by urging conversion to Islam during a three-day visit to the predominantly Roman Catholic country.
Col. Gadhafi held a series of private meetings on Sunday and Monday with some 800 Italian women and a small group of young men organized by a hostess agency and paid for by the Libyan government.
Read it all.
Col. Gadhafi held a series of private meetings on Sunday and Monday with some 800 Italian women and a small group of young men organized by a hostess agency and paid for by the Libyan government.
Read it all.
Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • Africa • Libya • Europe • Italy • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Islam
For decades, the intellectual descendants of Darwin have pored over ancient bones and bits of fossils, trying to piece together how fish evolved into man, theorizing about the evolutionary advantage conferred by each physical change. And over the past 10 years, a small group of academics have begun to look at religion in the same way: they've started to look at God and the supernatural through the lens of evolution.
In the history of the world, every culture in every location at every point in time has developed some supernatural belief system. And when a human behavior is so universal, scientists often argue that it must be an evolutionary adaptation along the lines of standing upright. That is, something so helpful that the people who had it thrived, and the people who didn't slowly died out until we were all left with the trait. But what could be the evolutionary advantage of believing in God?
[Jesse] Bering is one of the academics who are trying to figure that out. In the years since his mother's death, Bering has done experiments in his lab at Queens University, Belfast, in an attempt to understand how belief in the supernatural might have conferred some advantage and made us into the species we are today.
Read or listen to it all.
In the history of the world, every culture in every location at every point in time has developed some supernatural belief system. And when a human behavior is so universal, scientists often argue that it must be an evolutionary adaptation along the lines of standing upright. That is, something so helpful that the people who had it thrived, and the people who didn't slowly died out until we were all left with the trait. But what could be the evolutionary advantage of believing in God?
[Jesse] Bering is one of the academics who are trying to figure that out. In the years since his mother's death, Bering has done experiments in his lab at Queens University, Belfast, in an attempt to understand how belief in the supernatural might have conferred some advantage and made us into the species we are today.
Read or listen to it all.
Filed under: * Culture-Watch • History • Psychology • Religion & Culture • Science & Technology • * Theology • Anthropology
Pope John Paul II was seen as the great communicating pontiff, a man who went out from the Vatican to engage with the world. The message was clear and the symbolism spot on: remember him kneeling to kiss the ground when he came to the UK during the Falklands war in 1982? The present pope, Benedict XVI, could not be more different. A scholarly man who made his way as the previous pope's enforcer in the Vatican, he is not a natural communicator.
Benedict XVI's regime has seen several PR disasters: the Regensburg address in 2006, which was widely interpreted as an attack on Muslims, then the suggestion that saving humanity from homosexuality was as important as saving the rainforest, and the decision to pardon Richard Williamson, the Holocaust-denying British bishop.
Read it all.
Benedict XVI's regime has seen several PR disasters: the Regensburg address in 2006, which was widely interpreted as an attack on Muslims, then the suggestion that saving humanity from homosexuality was as important as saving the rainforest, and the decision to pardon Richard Williamson, the Holocaust-denying British bishop.
Read it all.
Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Media • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • England / UK • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Roman Catholic • Pope Benedict XVI
Read it carefully and it all (17 page pdf of a journal article from Cultural Encounters).
Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Blogging & the Internet • Religion & Culture • * Theology
The independent state MP Clover Moore has moved to shore up support for her same-sex adoption bill by giving church adoption agencies the right to refuse services to gay and lesbian couples without breaching anti-discrimination laws.
Ms Moore wrote to MPs on Friday announcing she would amend the bill and reintroduce it to Parliament on Thursday.
She told the Herald she was amending the bill "in line with requests" from church adoption agencies to help ensure its passage through Parliament.
Read it all.
Ms Moore wrote to MPs on Friday announcing she would amend the bill and reintroduce it to Parliament on Thursday.
She told the Herald she was amending the bill "in line with requests" from church adoption agencies to help ensure its passage through Parliament.
Read it all.
Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Anglican Church of Australia • * Culture-Watch • Law & Legal Issues • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • Australia / NZ • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches
In the late 19th century, the forces of religious division in America targeted Catholics. Josiah Strong's book Our Country: Its Possible Future and Present Crisis referred to Catholics as "the alien Romanist" who swore allegiance to the pope instead of the country and rejected core American values such as freedom of the press and religious liberty. The book remained in print for decades and sold nearly 200,000 copies.
In the early 20th century, the forces of religious division in America targeted Jews. Harvard scholar Diana Eck writes, "In the 1930s and early 1940s, hate organizations grew and conspiracy theories about Jewish influence spread like wildfire." In 1939, Father Charles Coughlin's Christian Front filled Madison Square Garden with 20,000 people at a vitriolic anti-Semitic event complete with banners that read: "Stop Jewish Domination of America."
Today, the forces of religious division demonize Muslims....
Read it all
In the early 20th century, the forces of religious division in America targeted Jews. Harvard scholar Diana Eck writes, "In the 1930s and early 1940s, hate organizations grew and conspiracy theories about Jewish influence spread like wildfire." In 1939, Father Charles Coughlin's Christian Front filled Madison Square Garden with 20,000 people at a vitriolic anti-Semitic event complete with banners that read: "Stop Jewish Domination of America."
Today, the forces of religious division demonize Muslims....
Read it all
Filed under: * Culture-Watch • History • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • America/U.S.A.
Bob Lane believes people are searching for more than traditional answers to their spiritual needs.
Canadians are more often looking away from traditional western religions to fulfill those needs.
Lane understands why events like Saturday's Pagan Pride Day are attracting more and more people every year and why a growing number of young people are not attending traditional churches.
Rev. Brian Evans of St. Paul's Anglican Church can't put his finger on why, but agrees a growing number of people in British Columbia are looking elsewhere for spiritual fulfilment.
"All the indicators tell us that we (B.C.) have the highest percentage of people in North America who do not participate in traditional Christian Church practices," Evans said.
Read it all
Canadians are more often looking away from traditional western religions to fulfill those needs.
Lane understands why events like Saturday's Pagan Pride Day are attracting more and more people every year and why a growing number of young people are not attending traditional churches.
Rev. Brian Evans of St. Paul's Anglican Church can't put his finger on why, but agrees a growing number of people in British Columbia are looking elsewhere for spiritual fulfilment.
"All the indicators tell us that we (B.C.) have the highest percentage of people in North America who do not participate in traditional Christian Church practices," Evans said.
Read it all
Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • Canada
I am interested in the following: where was it offered, who taught it, what aids did you use if any (book, video), how long did it last (both the classes themselves as well as the overall course), and, most especially, WHY did it have such a big impact on you? Any other details are of course welcome. Many thanks--KSH.
Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Adult Education • * Culture-Watch • Blogging & the Internet • Religion & Culture
Mosques have commemoratively been established upon the ruins or in the shells of the sacred buildings of other religions—most notably but not exclusively in Cordoba, Jerusalem, Istanbul, and India. When sited in this fashion they are monuments to victory, and the chief objection to this one is not to its existence but that it would be near the site of atrocities—not just one—closely associated with mosques because they were planned and at times celebrated in them.
Building close to Ground Zero disregards the passions, grief and preferences not only of most of the families of September 11th but, because we are all the families of September 11th, those of the American people as well, even if not the whole of the American people. If the project is to promote moderate Islam, why have its sponsors so relentlessly, without the slightest compromise, insisted upon such a sensitive and inflammatory setting? That is not moderate. It is aggressively militant.
Disregarding pleas to build it at a sufficient remove so as not to be linked to an abomination committed, widely praised, and throughout the world seldom condemned in the name of Islam, the militant proponents of the World Trade Center mosque are guilty of a poorly concealed provocation. They dare Americans to appear anti-Islamic and intolerant or just to roll over.
Read it all.
Building close to Ground Zero disregards the passions, grief and preferences not only of most of the families of September 11th but, because we are all the families of September 11th, those of the American people as well, even if not the whole of the American people. If the project is to promote moderate Islam, why have its sponsors so relentlessly, without the slightest compromise, insisted upon such a sensitive and inflammatory setting? That is not moderate. It is aggressively militant.
Disregarding pleas to build it at a sufficient remove so as not to be linked to an abomination committed, widely praised, and throughout the world seldom condemned in the name of Islam, the militant proponents of the World Trade Center mosque are guilty of a poorly concealed provocation. They dare Americans to appear anti-Islamic and intolerant or just to roll over.
Read it all.
Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Law & Legal Issues • Religion & Culture • * Economics, Politics • Politics in General • City Government • Terrorism • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Islam
I was perilously close to becoming an agnostic—at least about certain statistics. Specifically, I really didn't know the data on Christians in China, and for a while I was not sure if anyone did. Only now, perhaps, do we have the glimmerings of an answer to one of the most pressing questions in global religion: just how many Chinese Christians are there?
This question matters enormously because of China's vast population—now over 1.3 billion—and its emerging role as a global superpower. If Christians make up even a sizable minority within that country, that could be a political fact of huge significance.
Some years ago, veteran journalist David Aikman suggested that China's Christian population was reaching critical mass and that Christianity would achieve cultural and political hegemony by 2030 or so. Writing in First Things last year, Catholic China-watcher Francesco Sisci agreed that "we are near a Constantinian moment for the Chinese Empire." If we could say confidently that China today had, say, 100 or 150 million Christian believers, that would also make the country one of the largest centers of the faith worldwide, with the potential of a still greater role in years to come.
But what can we actually say with confidence when honest and reliable authorities differ so widely on the basic numbers?
Read it all.
This question matters enormously because of China's vast population—now over 1.3 billion—and its emerging role as a global superpower. If Christians make up even a sizable minority within that country, that could be a political fact of huge significance.
Some years ago, veteran journalist David Aikman suggested that China's Christian population was reaching critical mass and that Christianity would achieve cultural and political hegemony by 2030 or so. Writing in First Things last year, Catholic China-watcher Francesco Sisci agreed that "we are near a Constantinian moment for the Chinese Empire." If we could say confidently that China today had, say, 100 or 150 million Christian believers, that would also make the country one of the largest centers of the faith worldwide, with the potential of a still greater role in years to come.
But what can we actually say with confidence when honest and reliable authorities differ so widely on the basic numbers?
Read it all.
Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Globalization • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • Asia • China • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches
Nobody keeps track of how many black Orthodox Jews are in New York or across the nation, and surely it is a tiny fraction of both populations. Indeed, even the number of black Jews over all is elusive, though a 2005 book about Jewish diversity, “In Every Tongue,” cited studies suggesting that some 435,000 American Jews, or 7 percent, were black, Hispanic, Asian or American Indian.
“Everyone agrees that the numbers have grown, and they should be noticed,” said Jonathan D. Sarna of Brandeis University, a pre-eminent historian of American Jewry. “Once, there was a sense that ‘so-and-so looked Jewish.’ Today, because of conversion and intermarriage and patrilineal descent, that’s less and less true. The average synagogue looks more like America.
“Even in an Orthodox synagogue, there’s likely to be a few people who look different,” Professor Sarna said, “and everybody assumes that will grow.”
Through the Internet, younger black Orthodox Jews are coming together in ways they never could before.
Read it all.
“Everyone agrees that the numbers have grown, and they should be noticed,” said Jonathan D. Sarna of Brandeis University, a pre-eminent historian of American Jewry. “Once, there was a sense that ‘so-and-so looked Jewish.’ Today, because of conversion and intermarriage and patrilineal descent, that’s less and less true. The average synagogue looks more like America.
“Even in an Orthodox synagogue, there’s likely to be a few people who look different,” Professor Sarna said, “and everybody assumes that will grow.”
Through the Internet, younger black Orthodox Jews are coming together in ways they never could before.
Read it all.
Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Blogging & the Internet • Race/Race Relations • Religion & Culture • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Judaism
Katherine Marshall, 63, a senior fellow at Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, spent more than three decades with the World Bank, working in part to create space for faith in discussions about development. She sat down with The Washington Examiner to share her beliefs, and why due respect for religion can make all the difference....
Do you consider yourself to be of a specific faith?
I was raised an Episcopalian, and spent part of my childhood in England, where there was an intensely Anglican focus to my school. As students, we attended chapel, and regularly studied the Bible as a subject, and performed church music and dramas. Through that I came to appreciate the cultural heritage, and also to a degree the intellectual grounding of the faith. I still consider myself an Episcopalian, and I admire and support the global focus of the Episcopal Church, and its integral concern for issues of social justice and combating poverty.
Read it all.
Do you consider yourself to be of a specific faith?
I was raised an Episcopalian, and spent part of my childhood in England, where there was an intensely Anglican focus to my school. As students, we attended chapel, and regularly studied the Bible as a subject, and performed church music and dramas. Through that I came to appreciate the cultural heritage, and also to a degree the intellectual grounding of the faith. I still consider myself an Episcopalian, and I admire and support the global focus of the Episcopal Church, and its integral concern for issues of social justice and combating poverty.
Read it all.
Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Episcopal Church (TEC) • * Culture-Watch • Globalization • History • Religion & Culture
If you're the parent of a Christian teenager, Kenda Creasy Dean has this warning:
Your child is following a "mutant" form of Christianity, and you may be responsible.
Dean says more American teenagers are embracing what she calls "moralistic therapeutic deism." Translation: It's a watered-down faith that portrays God as a "divine therapist" whose chief goal is to boost people's self-esteem.
Dean is a minister, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and the author of "Almost Christian," a new book that argues that many parents and pastors are unwittingly passing on this self-serving strain of Christianity.
Read it all
Your child is following a "mutant" form of Christianity, and you may be responsible.
Dean says more American teenagers are embracing what she calls "moralistic therapeutic deism." Translation: It's a watered-down faith that portrays God as a "divine therapist" whose chief goal is to boost people's self-esteem.
Dean is a minister, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary and the author of "Almost Christian," a new book that argues that many parents and pastors are unwittingly passing on this self-serving strain of Christianity.
Read it all
Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Youth Ministry • * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • Teens / Youth • * Theology
KIM LAWTON, correspondent: About 20 minutes outside New Orleans, worshippers gather at First Baptist Church in Chalmette, the largest city in St. Bernard Parish. It’s a pretty typical Southern Baptist Sunday morning service.
REV JOHN DEE JEFFRIES (Preaching at First Baptist Church, Chalmette, Louisiana): Lord, what’s going on? Lord, why?
LAWTON: But that belies the incredible journey this congregation has made since Hurricane Katrina. More than half of the churches in St. Bernard Parish still haven’t come back, and most of them probably never will. First Baptist is not only back, but reinventing itself to help a community still struggling to recover.
Read it all
REV JOHN DEE JEFFRIES (Preaching at First Baptist Church, Chalmette, Louisiana): Lord, what’s going on? Lord, why?
LAWTON: But that belies the incredible journey this congregation has made since Hurricane Katrina. More than half of the churches in St. Bernard Parish still haven’t come back, and most of them probably never will. First Baptist is not only back, but reinventing itself to help a community still struggling to recover.
Read it all
Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Pastoral Care • * Culture-Watch • Hurricane Katrina • Religion & Culture • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Baptists
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has long worked to bridge divisions, be they fissures between interfaith husbands and wives or political chasms separating the United States and the Muslim world.
The 61-year-old clergyman is now in the midst of a polarizing political, religious and cultural debate over plans for a multistory Islamic center that will feature a mosque, health club and theater about two blocks north of ground zero. He is one of the leaders of the Park51 project, but has largely been absent from the national debate over the implications of building a Muslim house of worship so close to where terrorists killed more than 2,700 people.
Though Rauf has said the center, which could cost more than $100 million, would serve as a space for interfaith dialogue, moderate Muslim practice and peaceful prayer, critics say it will create a base for radical, anti-American Islam. Some critics have also asked where the funding for the center might originate and whether it may come from sources linked to Muslim extremists.
Read it all.
The 61-year-old clergyman is now in the midst of a polarizing political, religious and cultural debate over plans for a multistory Islamic center that will feature a mosque, health club and theater about two blocks north of ground zero. He is one of the leaders of the Park51 project, but has largely been absent from the national debate over the implications of building a Muslim house of worship so close to where terrorists killed more than 2,700 people.
Though Rauf has said the center, which could cost more than $100 million, would serve as a space for interfaith dialogue, moderate Muslim practice and peaceful prayer, critics say it will create a base for radical, anti-American Islam. Some critics have also asked where the funding for the center might originate and whether it may come from sources linked to Muslim extremists.
Read it all.
Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • * Economics, Politics • Politics in General • City Government • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Islam
Herewith the BBC lead in write up:
Listen to it all (about 6 3/4 minutes).
The retiring Bishop of Durham, Dr Tom Wright, has called for a renewed focus on social mobility in the light of "the long failure of the enlightenment project". Speaking to James Naughtie, he said that in an "increasingly religious age" we needed to find new ways of dealing with the way "human beings mess things up".
Listen to it all (about 6 3/4 minutes).
Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Church of England (CoE) • CoE Bishops • * Culture-Watch • History • Philosophy • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • England / UK • Europe
It is conventionally assumed that Greene’s faith, after flaming sky-high in The End of the Affair (a novel in which God Himself figures as an adulterous third party), burned lower in later life. In the 1968 BBC interview, Greene says that he no longer communicates or takes confession.
[Michael] Brennan modifies this received view. He teases out a persistent, subtle and often contrarian engagement with Catholicism in Greene’s thinking, even before the conversion. Greene was, he argues, idiosyncratically Manichean in his early life and was later drawn to a Liberation theology which fused his theological and Marxist impulses. Hell, Greene once said, “doesn’t make sense to me” – yet he was forever looking for it in the Congo (A Burnt-Out Case), Haiti (The Comedians) and, closer to home, the English seaside (Brighton Rock).
Catholicism, Brennan argues, supplied not so much a doctrine as the “intellectual scepticism” that drives Greene and his fiction. It manifests itself as a fascination with theological paradox – for example, that without Judas, the traitor, there would be no crucifixion and no salvation. Is he not, then, the best of the disciples?
Read it all.
[Michael] Brennan modifies this received view. He teases out a persistent, subtle and often contrarian engagement with Catholicism in Greene’s thinking, even before the conversion. Greene was, he argues, idiosyncratically Manichean in his early life and was later drawn to a Liberation theology which fused his theological and Marxist impulses. Hell, Greene once said, “doesn’t make sense to me” – yet he was forever looking for it in the Congo (A Burnt-Out Case), Haiti (The Comedians) and, closer to home, the English seaside (Brighton Rock).
Catholicism, Brennan argues, supplied not so much a doctrine as the “intellectual scepticism” that drives Greene and his fiction. It manifests itself as a fascination with theological paradox – for example, that without Judas, the traitor, there would be no crucifixion and no salvation. Is he not, then, the best of the disciples?
Read it all.
Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Books • Religion & Culture • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Roman Catholic
Certainly Catholic theologians have not been shy about addressing the questions that evolution raises for doctrines like original sin and the immateriality of the soul. In the 1960s, Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner re-interpreted Genesis in light of evolution, arguing that the story of Adam and Eve needed to be read metaphorically.
John Haught at Georgetown writes that the new cosmology of the expanding universe and the evolution of life require a more dynamic sense of God's role in a world that is still not complete, a work in progress. Father Denis Edwards at Flinders University in Australia treats the second person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, as a more active partner in the development of the evolving cosmos.
Whether the arguments of the theologians will move a future pope to broaden the Catholic Church's acceptance of evolution remains to be seen. So far, Pope Benedict XVI has not shown the same interest in evolution as his predecessor.
But on this 60th anniversary of "Humani Generis", Pius XII deserves credit for having the foresight to openly address the science when so many other denominations were either in deep denial or not interested in the challenge evolution poses for Christianity.
Read it all.
John Haught at Georgetown writes that the new cosmology of the expanding universe and the evolution of life require a more dynamic sense of God's role in a world that is still not complete, a work in progress. Father Denis Edwards at Flinders University in Australia treats the second person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, as a more active partner in the development of the evolving cosmos.
Whether the arguments of the theologians will move a future pope to broaden the Catholic Church's acceptance of evolution remains to be seen. So far, Pope Benedict XVI has not shown the same interest in evolution as his predecessor.
But on this 60th anniversary of "Humani Generis", Pius XII deserves credit for having the foresight to openly address the science when so many other denominations were either in deep denial or not interested in the challenge evolution poses for Christianity.
Read it all.
Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Church History • * Culture-Watch • History • Religion & Culture • Science & Technology • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Roman Catholic
Across the world, the bruising struggle over an Islamic center near ground zero has elicited some unexpected reactions.
For many in Europe, where much more bitter struggles have taken place over bans on facial veils in France and minarets in Switzerland, America’s fight over Park51 seems small fry, essentially a zoning spat in a culture war.
But others, especially in countries with nothing similar to the constitutional separation of church and state, find it puzzling that there is any controversy at all. In most Muslim nations, the state not only determines where mosques are built, but what the clerics inside can say.
The one constant expressed, regardless of geography, is that even though many in the United States have framed the future of the community center as a pivotal referendum on the core issues of religion, tolerance and free speech, those outside its borders see the debate as a confirmation of their pre-existing feelings about the country, whether good or bad.
Read it all.
For many in Europe, where much more bitter struggles have taken place over bans on facial veils in France and minarets in Switzerland, America’s fight over Park51 seems small fry, essentially a zoning spat in a culture war.
But others, especially in countries with nothing similar to the constitutional separation of church and state, find it puzzling that there is any controversy at all. In most Muslim nations, the state not only determines where mosques are built, but what the clerics inside can say.
The one constant expressed, regardless of geography, is that even though many in the United States have framed the future of the community center as a pivotal referendum on the core issues of religion, tolerance and free speech, those outside its borders see the debate as a confirmation of their pre-existing feelings about the country, whether good or bad.
Read it all.
Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Globalization • Religion & Culture • * Economics, Politics • Politics in General • City Government • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Islam
The wake-up call comes after a series of police-involved shootings since early July that have left four men dead and a community asking hard questions.
On July 5, a rookie police officer shot and killed DeCarlos Moore in Overtown as Moore disobeyed an order and returned to his car. He had no weapon.
The most recent case involved Tarnorris Tyrell Gaye, 19, who was shot and killed last Friday by the same officer who shot and killed a man during a sting-gone-bad nine days earlier.
That day, police say, 16-year-old Joell Lee Johnson was killed during an undercover police operation involving holdups of fast-food deliverers after the teen pointed a gun at the officer.
Read it all.
On July 5, a rookie police officer shot and killed DeCarlos Moore in Overtown as Moore disobeyed an order and returned to his car. He had no weapon.
The most recent case involved Tarnorris Tyrell Gaye, 19, who was shot and killed last Friday by the same officer who shot and killed a man during a sting-gone-bad nine days earlier.
That day, police say, 16-year-old Joell Lee Johnson was killed during an undercover police operation involving holdups of fast-food deliverers after the teen pointed a gun at the officer.
Read it all.
Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Ministry of the Ordained • * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • Violence • * Economics, Politics • Politics in General • City Government
John Pollock says it's unfair that he could ask for euthanasia in some countries, but not here, when he finally finds his suffering intolerable.
He has told New Zealand Doctor magazine that the law should be changed so that people have the comfort of knowing they can control their death, and says many doctors already practise euthanasia: a third of them admit to having hastened death....
Unlike Dr Pollock, perhaps, I see a difference between hastening inevitable death compassionately and killing, and I can't reconcile having a doctor who treats me as a living person one minute having the right to kill me the next.
Read it all.
He has told New Zealand Doctor magazine that the law should be changed so that people have the comfort of knowing they can control their death, and says many doctors already practise euthanasia: a third of them admit to having hastened death....
Unlike Dr Pollock, perhaps, I see a difference between hastening inevitable death compassionately and killing, and I can't reconcile having a doctor who treats me as a living person one minute having the right to kill me the next.
Read it all.
Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Death / Burial / Funerals • * Culture-Watch • Health & Medicine • Law & Legal Issues • Life Ethics • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • Australia / NZ • * Theology • Ethics / Moral Theology
When John Henry Newman died in 1890, he left instructions that he should be buried with another priest, his friend Ambrose St John, and he also made it clear that he wished his body to decay.
However, in 2008 the Catholic Church opened the grave, hoping to find bones which could be venerated. But there were no human remains. His physical being is gone for good, but his writings are still important.
Two new books have appeared in the run-up to the Pope's visit next month to Birmingham to beatify him — John Cornwell’s Newman’s Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (Continuum, £18.99 ) and Anthony Mockler’s John Henry Newman: Fighter, Convert and Cardinal (Signal Books, £9.99).
Both the authors are Catholics, but Mockler — owner of Milton Manor, near Abingdon — is quite orthodox, whereas Cornwell is a former trainee priest who has written critical biographies of two modern popes.
Read it all.
However, in 2008 the Catholic Church opened the grave, hoping to find bones which could be venerated. But there were no human remains. His physical being is gone for good, but his writings are still important.
Two new books have appeared in the run-up to the Pope's visit next month to Birmingham to beatify him — John Cornwell’s Newman’s Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint (Continuum, £18.99 ) and Anthony Mockler’s John Henry Newman: Fighter, Convert and Cardinal (Signal Books, £9.99).
Both the authors are Catholics, but Mockler — owner of Milton Manor, near Abingdon — is quite orthodox, whereas Cornwell is a former trainee priest who has written critical biographies of two modern popes.
Read it all.
Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Church of England (CoE) • * Christian Life / Church Life • Church History • * Culture-Watch • Books • Religion & Culture • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Roman Catholic • Pope Benedict XVI
Sharia in Arabic means a "way" or a "path." Muslims agree that sharia is God's law, but there is little consensus on the particulars. To some, sharia is a set of rules that are codified and unchanging. To others, it's a collection of religious principles that shift over time.
Imam Yahya Hendi, Muslim chaplain leader at Georgetown University and spokesman of the Islamic Jurisprudence Council of North America, describes Muslims as being divided into two camps: "those who see sharia mandating that we live as Muslims did 1,300 years ago, and those who say sharia doesn't have a specific format as to how you live your life, that Islam gives you paradigms."
This question of how to define sharia has become a more urgent issue for Muslims around the world in recent decades as, according to some estimates, one-third live outside Muslim-majority countries for the first time in history. Scholars debate at conferences what it means for a government or a person to be "sharia-compliant."
Read it all.
Imam Yahya Hendi, Muslim chaplain leader at Georgetown University and spokesman of the Islamic Jurisprudence Council of North America, describes Muslims as being divided into two camps: "those who see sharia mandating that we live as Muslims did 1,300 years ago, and those who say sharia doesn't have a specific format as to how you live your life, that Islam gives you paradigms."
This question of how to define sharia has become a more urgent issue for Muslims around the world in recent decades as, according to some estimates, one-third live outside Muslim-majority countries for the first time in history. Scholars debate at conferences what it means for a government or a person to be "sharia-compliant."
Read it all.
Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Law & Legal Issues • Religion & Culture • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Islam
Archbishop Timothy Dolan told parishioners during Mass on Sunday that he was saddened by a spate of suspected anti-Hispanic attacks on Staten Island that has left some Latin American immigrants fearing for their safety.
Dolan made the remarks during a Spanish-language sermon at St. Mary's of The Assumption Roman Catholic Church in the borough's Port Richmond section.
The small neighborhood is home to the majority of the borough's Mexican immigrants, who have been the targets of most of the dozen attacks since April, authorities have said. A gay Hispanic couple also was attacked in one incident.
Read it all.
Dolan made the remarks during a Spanish-language sermon at St. Mary's of The Assumption Roman Catholic Church in the borough's Port Richmond section.
The small neighborhood is home to the majority of the borough's Mexican immigrants, who have been the targets of most of the dozen attacks since April, authorities have said. A gay Hispanic couple also was attacked in one incident.
Read it all.
Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Law & Legal Issues • Psychology • Religion & Culture • Violence • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Roman Catholic
A lesbian minister, who officiated at more than a dozen same-sex weddings during the brief window gay marriage was legal in California, goes to trial Thursday before a Presbyterian court, charged with violating her denomination's constitution.
The case of the Rev. Jane Adams Spahr has gained national attention because "what is being tested is the definition of marriage" in the Presbyterian faith, said the Rev. Carmen Fowler, president of the Presbyterian Lay Committee, a conservative organization that opposes same-sex marriage.
Spahr's trial, which will be held in Napa, begins less than three weeks after a federal court judge ruled that California's ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. And it underscores the awkward position in which changing civil law places many clergy members.
Read it all.
The case of the Rev. Jane Adams Spahr has gained national attention because "what is being tested is the definition of marriage" in the Presbyterian faith, said the Rev. Carmen Fowler, president of the Presbyterian Lay Committee, a conservative organization that opposes same-sex marriage.
Spahr's trial, which will be held in Napa, begins less than three weeks after a federal court judge ruled that California's ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional. And it underscores the awkward position in which changing civil law places many clergy members.
Read it all.
Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Liturgy, Music, Worship • Parish Ministry • Ministry of the Ordained • * Culture-Watch • Law & Legal Issues • Marriage & Family • Religion & Culture • Sexuality • Civil Unions & Partnerships • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Presbyterian • Sexuality Debate (Other denominations and faiths)
Check it out to see which film(s) and book(s) were chosen.
Filed under: * Christian Life / Church Life • Parish Ministry • Adult Education • * Culture-Watch • Books • Movies & Television • Religion & Culture • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Presbyterian
... 33-year-old Nashville resident [Tyler Wigg-Stevenson] has assembled a surprising corps of allies and endorsers more than twice his age and known for their hawkish ways of yore, including retired U.S. senator Sam Nunn and Reagan-era secretary of State George Shultz.
Less encouraging is the shape of the initial resistance Wigg-Stevenson often encounters as he travels around the country urging Christians to join the nuclear abolition cause — a mind-set that coaxes many believers to accept, even welcome, the imminent end of the world. As signaled by the runaway success of the Left Behind books, end-time expectations hold undeniable sway in evangelical America, which makes long-term investments in a better future seem utterly beside the point.
Thankfully, Wigg-Stevenson and many new-breed evangelicals like him are refusing the kind of end-times bait that lets believers off the hook — off the hook of inspired social action that can make their faith a powerful blessing to their society and their time.
Read it all.
Less encouraging is the shape of the initial resistance Wigg-Stevenson often encounters as he travels around the country urging Christians to join the nuclear abolition cause — a mind-set that coaxes many believers to accept, even welcome, the imminent end of the world. As signaled by the runaway success of the Left Behind books, end-time expectations hold undeniable sway in evangelical America, which makes long-term investments in a better future seem utterly beside the point.
Thankfully, Wigg-Stevenson and many new-breed evangelicals like him are refusing the kind of end-times bait that lets believers off the hook — off the hook of inspired social action that can make their faith a powerful blessing to their society and their time.
Read it all.
Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Evangelicals • * Theology • Eschatology
Of all the elderly people he's visited, the Rev. Kenneth Dupin remembers a woman named Katie in particular.
Katie had a houseful of treasured memorabilia, and she loved to regale him with stories of Washington high society in the 1950s. But after she was moved to a nursing home, "she started crying," Dupin says. "I went over to her, and she pulled me down to where I could hear her, and she said, 'Please take me home.'"
She never did go back home, but after she died, her memory stayed with Dupin. He tells NPR's Audie Cornish that it got him wondering if there was a way to keep people like Katie out of nursing homes and closer to their families. His idea might seem strange, but "granny pods" are catching on.
Read or listen to it all.
Katie had a houseful of treasured memorabilia, and she loved to regale him with stories of Washington high society in the 1950s. But after she was moved to a nursing home, "she started crying," Dupin says. "I went over to her, and she pulled me down to where I could hear her, and she said, 'Please take me home.'"
She never did go back home, but after she died, her memory stayed with Dupin. He tells NPR's Audie Cornish that it got him wondering if there was a way to keep people like Katie out of nursing homes and closer to their families. His idea might seem strange, but "granny pods" are catching on.
Read or listen to it all.
Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Aging / the Elderly • Health & Medicine • Marriage & Family • Psychology • Religion & Culture • * Economics, Politics • Economy • Corporations/Corporate Life • * Theology • Pastoral Theology
The 10th Parallel is the line of latitude 700 miles north of the equator. It cuts across central Africa: Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, all the way to the Philippines. More than half of the world's Muslims live along the parallel, so do most of the world's Christians.
Journalist and poet Eliza Griswold spent seven years traveling in this region of the world, a place where religious conflict intersects with the growing struggle for land, resources and political power. She examines all of this in a new book called "The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam."
Eliza Griswold joins me now from our New York bureau. Thanks for being here.
Ms. ELIZA GRISWOLD Author, "The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam"): Thanks for having me, Rachel.
Read or listen to it all.
Journalist and poet Eliza Griswold spent seven years traveling in this region of the world, a place where religious conflict intersects with the growing struggle for land, resources and political power. She examines all of this in a new book called "The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam."
Eliza Griswold joins me now from our New York bureau. Thanks for being here.
Ms. ELIZA GRISWOLD Author, "The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line between Christianity and Islam"): Thanks for having me, Rachel.
Read or listen to it all.
Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Books • Religion & Culture • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Other Faiths • Islam • Muslim-Christian relations
Women have been denied opportunities for development and participation in all spheres of life, including the religious. This has had negative impacts on men and women.
Slowly, painfully, we have been learning to set our sexual stereotypes and prejudices beside the challenges of the Gospel. We are called to a life of justice, compassion, intelligence and patience that takes us beyond our own comfort and interests. While women have always played significant roles in Anglicanism (we are, after all, a Church to which definitive shape was given by a woman -- Elizabeth I!), it is only in the last few generations that we have discovered how life-giving it is for them to be involved in leadership and ministry in every order and level of the Church. We can no longer make invidious distinctions between "women in the Church" and "the Church."
Read it all.
Slowly, painfully, we have been learning to set our sexual stereotypes and prejudices beside the challenges of the Gospel. We are called to a life of justice, compassion, intelligence and patience that takes us beyond our own comfort and interests. While women have always played significant roles in Anglicanism (we are, after all, a Church to which definitive shape was given by a woman -- Elizabeth I!), it is only in the last few generations that we have discovered how life-giving it is for them to be involved in leadership and ministry in every order and level of the Church. We can no longer make invidious distinctions between "women in the Church" and "the Church."
Read it all.
Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Anglican Church of Canada • * Culture-Watch • Men • Religion & Culture • Women • * International News & Commentary • Canada
Absence of Mind, a small and fiercely concentrated book containing lectures given at Yale....[focuses] on the oddly obsessive urge in various kinds of contemporary thought to dissolve the mind itself, to deny the evidential importance of what it feels like to be a conscious subject.
Assorted popular scientists and psychologists have insisted that what we think we are doing, what we experience as thinking or judging or deciding, is illusory: we are self-deceived, because we are in fact acting out a script prescribed by genetically driven imperatives, or by the ergonomics of impersonal forces in the psyche.
This "exclusion of felt life" overflows into wider cultural attitudes and has the effect of lowering our expectations of ourselves – and so of reducing our imaginative reach. As Robinson puts it starkly at one point: who are "we", if the entire life of "reflection and emotion" is simply the method adopted by genes for their self-propagation?
Read it all (another from the long line of should-have-already-been-posted--KSH).
Assorted popular scientists and psychologists have insisted that what we think we are doing, what we experience as thinking or judging or deciding, is illusory: we are self-deceived, because we are in fact acting out a script prescribed by genetically driven imperatives, or by the ergonomics of impersonal forces in the psyche.
This "exclusion of felt life" overflows into wider cultural attitudes and has the effect of lowering our expectations of ourselves – and so of reducing our imaginative reach. As Robinson puts it starkly at one point: who are "we", if the entire life of "reflection and emotion" is simply the method adopted by genes for their self-propagation?
Read it all (another from the long line of should-have-already-been-posted--KSH).
Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams • * Culture-Watch • Books • Psychology • Religion & Culture
A contributing reporter for The New Yorker, Harper's and The New York Times Magazine, Griswold is deft at interweaving historical details with her narrative. Subtitled "Dispatches From the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam," the book ranges from bombed-out Mogadishu suburbs in Somalia to the Jakarta, Indonesia, neighborhoods where former jihadis peddle Prophet-sanctioned medicines.
In Africa, she interviews public figures: evangelist Franklin Graham on a visit to Sudan, and Somali warlords with connections to al-Qaida.
Grisworld does some of her best reporting in Indonesia and Malaysia, where her depiction of the lives of average people caught in the cross hairs of wider geopolitical conflicts is devastating. She writes movingly of indigenous Malaysians who continue to resist conversion by both world religions, in the face of an assault to their environment and livelihoods.
For Griswold, whose father was the Episcopal bishop of Chicago, religion is personal. Yet she finds her own conflicts as someone coming from a decidedly more liberal faith tradition than the ones she encounters.
Read it all.
In Africa, she interviews public figures: evangelist Franklin Graham on a visit to Sudan, and Somali warlords with connections to al-Qaida.
Grisworld does some of her best reporting in Indonesia and Malaysia, where her depiction of the lives of average people caught in the cross hairs of wider geopolitical conflicts is devastating. She writes movingly of indigenous Malaysians who continue to resist conversion by both world religions, in the face of an assault to their environment and livelihoods.
For Griswold, whose father was the Episcopal bishop of Chicago, religion is personal. Yet she finds her own conflicts as someone coming from a decidedly more liberal faith tradition than the ones she encounters.
Read it all.
Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Episcopal Church (TEC) • * Culture-Watch • Books • Religion & Culture • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Other Faiths • Islam • Muslim-Christian relations
The first of six large group gatherings kicked off the four-day event with a live band, drama troupe, a "parade of Bishops," and keynote speaker — The Rev'd Canon William Cliff, Rector of The Collegiate Chapel of St. John the Evangelist at Huron University College and parish priest for Huron University College and the Anglican Community at the University of Western Ontario.
"I want scripture to come alive for you," exclaimed Cliff as he laid out three ground rules for the youth to follow for his presentations during the gathering and for when reading scripture in general. The rules included: The Gospel is always astonishing; The Gospel is never fair — "because the Gospel is about grace"; and God always acts first. "We are going to find the most unfair, grace-filled, astonishing reading in which God acts first," declared Cliff.
Read it all.
"I want scripture to come alive for you," exclaimed Cliff as he laid out three ground rules for the youth to follow for his presentations during the gathering and for when reading scripture in general. The rules included: The Gospel is always astonishing; The Gospel is never fair — "because the Gospel is about grace"; and God always acts first. "We are going to find the most unfair, grace-filled, astonishing reading in which God acts first," declared Cliff.
Read it all.
Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Anglican Church of Canada • * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • Teens / Youth • * International News & Commentary • Canada • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Churches • Lutheran
(Make sure to view the actual cover there).
You don't have to be prejudiced against Islam to believe, as many Americans do, that the area around Ground Zero is a sacred place. But sadly, in an election season, such sentiments have been stoked into a political issue. As the debate has grown more heated, Park51, as the proposed Muslim cultural center and mosque two blocks from Ground Zero is called, has become a litmus test for everything from private-property rights to religious tolerance. But it is plain that many of Park51's opponents are motivated by deep-seated Islamophobia.
Read it all.
You don't have to be prejudiced against Islam to believe, as many Americans do, that the area around Ground Zero is a sacred place. But sadly, in an election season, such sentiments have been stoked into a political issue. As the debate has grown more heated, Park51, as the proposed Muslim cultural center and mosque two blocks from Ground Zero is called, has become a litmus test for everything from private-property rights to religious tolerance. But it is plain that many of Park51's opponents are motivated by deep-seated Islamophobia.
Read it all.
Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • * Economics, Politics • Politics in General • City Government • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Islam
Our Constitution may or may not be more concerned with justice than sensitivity. Interestingly, there is a portion of Scripture that addresses this. In both chapters 6 and 10 of Paul's letter, First Corinthians, he instructs his fellow Christians with this admonition: "All things are lawful, but not all things are helpful." In that context, if Paul is urging Christians in a pluralistic society to be sensitive to others whose views and values may be different from theirs, he is also urging those same Christians to not be overly sensitive when their sensibilities are offended. Indeed, it is a Christian ethic that admonishes both offender and offended alike.
My life has been enriched by relationships with people different from myself, religiously or otherwise -- enough, in fact, for me to conclude that the surest way to rob any of us of our humanity is to pay too much attention to how we have been labeled. The First Amendment reflects the highest and noblest vision of our great nation. And for many of us, at least, that means we are most Christian when we understand, accept and respect those who aren't.
Read it all.
My life has been enriched by relationships with people different from myself, religiously or otherwise -- enough, in fact, for me to conclude that the surest way to rob any of us of our humanity is to pay too much attention to how we have been labeled. The First Amendment reflects the highest and noblest vision of our great nation. And for many of us, at least, that means we are most Christian when we understand, accept and respect those who aren't.
Read it all.
Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • * Economics, Politics • Politics in General • City Government • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Islam
Three arguments seem to characterize the dispute over plans to build an Islamic community center on Park Place in lower Manhattan, two blocks north of the World Trade Center site: the constitutional defense, the emotional appeal and the national security claim.
Read it all.
Read it all.
Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Law & Legal Issues • Religion & Culture • * Religion News & Commentary • Other Faiths • Islam
The Anglican Church of Burundi kicked off its 75th anniversary celebrations during the Aug. 14-15 weekend with a service of thanksgiving and prayer at St. Luke's Cathedral in Gitega and a service of Holy Communion at St. Peter's Church in Buhiga.
Bishop Nathan Kamusiime Gasatura of the Diocese of Butare in the Anglican Church of Rwanda reminded the congregation in Buhiga that "there was cause for celebration because of the dedication, commitment, and witness based on the Word of God of the first Christians. They set an example for future generations to follow," according to a press release from the Anglican Church of Burundi.
During his sermon in Gitega, Bishop Geoffrey Rwubusisi of the Diocese of Cyangugu, Rwanda, asked the congregation to stand in silent prayer and thanksgiving for the early pioneers "who sacrificed much to bring the Gospel of God's saving and reconciling love to Burundi. Such love and unity should characterize the church of the future," the release said.
Read it all.
Bishop Nathan Kamusiime Gasatura of the Diocese of Butare in the Anglican Church of Rwanda reminded the congregation in Buhiga that "there was cause for celebration because of the dedication, commitment, and witness based on the Word of God of the first Christians. They set an example for future generations to follow," according to a press release from the Anglican Church of Burundi.
During his sermon in Gitega, Bishop Geoffrey Rwubusisi of the Diocese of Cyangugu, Rwanda, asked the congregation to stand in silent prayer and thanksgiving for the early pioneers "who sacrificed much to bring the Gospel of God's saving and reconciling love to Burundi. Such love and unity should characterize the church of the future," the release said.
Read it all.
Filed under: * Anglican - Episcopal • Anglican Provinces • Anglican Church of Burundi • * Christian Life / Church Life • Church History • Missions • * Culture-Watch • Religion & Culture • * International News & Commentary • Africa
Gay marriage is not going away as a highly emotional, contested issue. Proposition 8, the California ballot measure that bans same-sex marriage, has seen to that, as it winds its way through the federal courts.
But perhaps the public has reached a turning point.
A CNN poll this month found that a narrow majority of Americans supported same-sex marriage — the first poll to find majority support. Other poll results did not go that far, but still, on average, showed that support for gay marriage had risen to 45 percent or more (with the rest either opposed or undecided).
Read it all.
But perhaps the public has reached a turning point.
A CNN poll this month found that a narrow majority of Americans supported same-sex marriage — the first poll to find majority support. Other poll results did not go that far, but still, on average, showed that support for gay marriage had risen to 45 percent or more (with the rest either opposed or undecided).
Read it all.
Filed under: * Culture-Watch • Law & Legal Issues • Marriage & Family • Psychology • Religion & Culture • Sexuality • Civil Unions & Partnerships • * Economics, Politics • Politics in General • House of Representatives • Office of the President • President Barack Obama • Senate • State Government • * Theology • Anthropology • Ethics / Moral Theology
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