The Huffington Post website carries a blog with the title “Faith Shift” written by Jaweed Kaleem. Last year, the blog reported on a large conference in Garrison, New York, supported by major Buddhist centers and periodicals. The focus of the conference was the future of Buddhism in America. The religion is represented in this country […]
Peter Berger
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Religion & Other Curiosities
August 29, 2012
August 22, 2012
Judaism and Christianity: Embracing the “Other”?
There cannot be two other religious traditions whose historical relations have been as awful as those between Judaism and Christianity. For centuries Jews suffered discrimination and persecution in countries that defined themselves as Christian, culminating in the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust (while the Nazi ideology which legitimated the latter was anything but Christian, it […]
August 15, 2012
Can you be a Catholic and have a questioning mind?
There has been no shortage of recent media stories bound to embarrass the Roman Catholic Church. There has been no end of reports about priests abusing boys and girls under their care (more boys than girls, it seems), culminating in the criminal conviction of an ecclesiastical official for protecting abusive priests. And there have now […]
August 8, 2012
Darwin's Ghost
Charles Darwin published his culture-shaking Origin of Species in 1859. It immediately provoked a passionate controversy. This is hardly surprising. The Darwinian culture shock can be compared to an earlier one: the Copernican one. Copernicus made people see the earth as one of several planets circling the sun, rather than as the center of the […]
August 1, 2012
A Federal Court Disclaims Its Ability to Decide What is True and Not
A while ago on this blog I commented on a judgment by a Texas court which ruled that so-called “imprecatory prayer” (that is, prayer that asks God to inflict harm) is protected speech under the first amendment of the US constitution. The court asserted that there was no evidence that the prayer had actually harmed […]
