Posts Tagged ‘faith’

September 19th, 2012

Documentary project on the faith of New York City

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Faith in the Five Boroughs is a documentary film project that focuses on the religious lives of New York City immigrants.

August 8th, 2012

Mormon appointed to White House faith-based advisory council

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Recently, Religion News Service reported that President Obama had appointed the first Mormon member to his faith-based advisory council.

August 7th, 2012

Loss of faith in religious institutions

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NPR recently reported on a Gallup poll, which showed Americans’ faith in organized religion and religious institutions has declined.

July 11th, 2012

Exodus International renounces gay “cure”

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Recently, the President of Exodus International, Alan Chambers, made statements renouncing some of his organization’s beliefs, such as the ability to “cure” homosexuality by Christian prayer and psychotherapy.

December 12th, 2011

2012 Lake Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship

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The Lake Institute on Faith and Giving at the Center on Philanthropy, Indiana University, is currently fielding applications for the 2012 Lake Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship.

October 12th, 2011

#OccupyWallSt, spirituality, and faith

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On September 17, protesters heeded the call to occupy Wall Street and set up camp in a semi-public park in downtown Manhattan’s Financial District that is once again known as Liberty Plaza. In the roughly three weeks since the Occupy Wall Street protests began, several commentators have begun reflecting on the place of faith in the movement. The meditation area on Liberty Plaza is only the most overt of the influences of faith or spirituality on the protest movement.

December 20th, 2008

Naive and reflective faiths

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<br />It was difficult all along to conceive of religion (its ritual practices, mystical unions, or attractions and immersions of any other kind) without at the same time postulating or affirming a distancing—reflective or speculative, in case hypothetico-skeptical—stance vis-à-vis the world and life-world in all its worldly aspects. Religion, throughout the text of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, meant “engagement” and “disengagement” in theoretical, practical, and, more broadly, existential matters at once. To the very heart of religious belief there belongs not only an affirmation, but also a suspension of belief in the cosmic, social, or subjective matrices and fabrics of which we are made up. Our being-in-the world, qua believers, is, after all, if not exactly other-worldly, not-quite-of-or-out-of-this-world. [...]

October 20th, 2008

Resistance, critique, religion

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Justin Neuman’s stimulating last post encouraged me to reread the debate asking “Is Critique Secular?”from the beginning, and in doing so I began to wonder what would happen to the discussion if we added to it the notion of “resistance”.  By resistance I simply mean the refusal to accept the social system in which one lives.  I am partly inspired by Robert Bellah’s wonderful post, which makes the case that elements within several axial religions share a single impulse with Western theoria, namely renunciation thought precisely as (a practical and/or conceptual) departure from one’s inherited social condition.  For Bellah, renunciation typically becomes institutionalized and then carries out critique from a relatively autonomous social space, in a routinizing extension which, somewhat in Charles Taylor’s spirit, he thinks contains “explosive potentialities for good and for evil.”

October 14th, 2008

Welcome to the faith-based economy

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Last week as I listened, along with many other Americans and others around the world, to President Bush’s most recent effort to reassure us about the current economic meltdown I had a “Road to Damascus” moment.  It happened as I heard Bush repeat the word “faith”. [...]

May 30th, 2008

The cognitive revolution and the decline of monotheism

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To appreciate the cultural impact of the “cognitive revolution” discussed by David Brooks in his New York Times op-ed column “The Neural Buddhists” (May 13, 2008), we need to be clear about what has and has not been revolutionized by neuroscience. Brooks gets the research essentially right, but he overlooks some key issues raised by “neural Buddhism” that make me question his view of its future effects on religion and culture. [...]