Religion
Even the most plain, factual description of Andrew Conley’s murder of his kid brother is chillingly disturbing: The teenager told police he choked his brother while they were wrestling until the boy passed out. He said he then dragged his brother into the kitchen, put on gloves and continued strangling him for at least 20…
So, you might have come across the minor splash that physicist Stephen Hawking recently made by publishing a book that declares the concept of God unnecessary. Physicist Mike Flynn notes some need for specificity of terms, in such conversations: … to say that a space-time manifold came from “nothing” is a stretch. The “no-universe state”…
Here’s an interesting incident from an article about expanding restrictions on counter-Islamic blasphemy in and out of the Muslim world: In Kabul in 2008, Ghaus Zalmai and Mushtaq Ahmad were each sentenced to 20 years in prison for publishing a Dari translation of the Koran (the translator was U.S. resident Qudratullah Bakhtiarinejad). The minister for…
Here’s a fascinating dynamic, not only for the Muslim state, but the perspective that factions of the West might bring of it: Now King Abdullah is moving to regain control over this abundance of fatwas. Under a royal decree issued in mid-August, only the official panel may issue the fatwas that answer every question of…
I’m sure it’s just taking some time for transreligion councils to organize their press conferences over this story: The Seattle cartoonist whose artwork sparked the controversial “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day!” has gone into hiding at the advice of the FBI after being targeted by a radical Muslim cleric, according to the newspaper that published her…
It’s often subtle — and I certainly don’t mean to discourage interaction between leaders of different religions — but it does seem as if the statements of unity all follow a, well, a non-objective narrative. After an apparently religiously inspired multiple murder, an act of terrorism, to be blunt, this was the message of the…
A mid-August column by Fr. John Kiley has been swinging in the background of my mind: In spite of this legacy of warnings about the gravity of the end times, the prospect of final judgment and any thought of ultimate justice have almost disappeared from the modern Christian mind. Saturday afternoon lines at the confessional…
Some strains of Darwinian secularism are speckled throughout with signs of the mansions and vast estates of their most prominent promoters. Such appears to be the case with Matt Ridley’s philosophy, as presented in George Gilder’s review of his book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves: Reason, to Ridley’s mind, impels us relentlessly forward and…
The Islamic practice of women’s veiling, extending to the absurd and offensive burqa, presents difficult questions for the West. Who are we, we wonder, to trample other cultures voluntarily perpetuated? Worse yet is the question of whether a society can stop intolerance once it has granted itself permission to discriminate against that which it finds…
I’m not sure what inspired the Providence Journal to transport this essay from one coast to another, but with the assumption that the objective was to begin debate, rather than conclude it, I thought it worth taking up. The argument of William Lobdell’s broadside on religious Americans, initially published in the LA Times, is that…