On December 29, 2012, the New York Times carried an article by Samuel Freedman, who is on the faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and who regularly writes in the religion column of the Times. The article is entitled “In a Crisis, Humanists seem Absent”. It dealt with the strong religious […]

About the same time, in early December 2012, that the media went into high gear discussing the putatively catastrophic consequences of a “fiscal cliff” on January 1, 2013, they also reported quite extensively about another looming date, that one a little earlier, on December 21, 2012, when according to some calculations the so-called Long Count […]

Religion News Service on December 14, 2012, carried a story about a Southern Baptist pastor in Missouri who has been accused of child abuse. At first I glossed over the story, having had my fill of stories about clerical pedophilia (though it is, so to speak, ecumenically welcome that for once the alleged offense cannot […]

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung is generally regarded as one of the two best newspapers in Germany. I don’t normally read it, but a German colleague sent me the issue of December 7, 2012, thinking that it might interest me. It did. A story, filed by a reporter named Renate Meinhof, covered a breakfast meeting on the […]

The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is an icon of religious freedom, and rightly so. It contains a double prohibition: no establishment of religion and no hindrance to the free exercise of religion. The two clauses often grind against each other. Adopted by Congress in 1791, the Amendment still comes up […]

My last two posts had the quality of academic mini-lectures. I don’t want my readers to suspect that I have gone into the business (a growing one, judging by ads all over the place) of long-distance education, so this post will break the pattern. It is somewhere between an intuition and a meditation.There were two […]

Recently, on the same day, I came across two religious news items that made me think again about a topic which has long interested me: that of dialogue between religious traditions. The first item was a story in the British Catholic periodical The Tablet on November 10, 2012. It concerns a collaborative project of the […]

On All Saints Day in 1755 a powerful earthquake destroyed most of the city of Lisbon. The earthquake, which was followed by a huge tsunami, devastated large areas of Portugal, Spain and Morocco, claiming tens of thousands of lives. As such natural disorders always do, it raised religious questions in many minds—in supposedly Christian Europe […]

As was widely reported in both religious and secular media, on October 5, 2012, a letter highly critical of Israel was sent to Congress by leaders of most of the major mainline Protestant denominations and the National Council of Churches (which is dominated by them). The denominations include the biggies—the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United […]

The online periodical Huffington Post had the following story on October 10, 2012: Paul Broun, a Republican congressman from Georgia, made a speech at a Baptist church in which he affirmed his creationist convictions. Broun is a doctor and on the basis of this claimed to speak “as a scientist” (if only he were right […]