I grapple with this every semester. Should I or shouldn’t I? Some semesters I announce to my religion classes that I’m a “thinking theist”. I’m not ashamed of being a person of faith, but I realize that I take the risk of alienating some students right off the bat. But I work hard to assure all students that being they won’t get a free ride if they fill their essays with theistic blather”. I also make sure students feel safe being critical of religion. However, those criticisms have to be thoughtful otherwise the “philosopher” in me will rear her analytical fangs. Ada Calhoun describes her trials in this recent Salon.com article:

It was Sunday morning in my scruffy Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood, and I was wearing a dress. Walking to the subway, I ran into a friend heading home from yoga class. She wore sweats and carried her mat over her shoulder. “Where are you going so early all dressed up?” she asked, chuckling. “To church?” We shared a laugh at the absurdity of a liberal New Yorker heading off to worship.

The real joke? I totally was.

New study on prayer and forgiveness. Here are the experiments:

The new study, published in the journal Psychological Science, draws data from 119 people over two experiments.

In the first, participants assigned to say a single prayer for their romantic partner reported a greater willingness to be forgiving of that person than did participants who were asked to describe their partner to a recording device “as if they were (talking) to a parent.”

The second study was more revealing, with participants – all of whom were comfortable with prayer – split into three groups: those asked to pray for a friend, those asked to pray about any topic, and those asked to think positive thoughts about a friend every day for four weeks.

People in the first group were much more likely to be forgiving of that friend than those in either of the latter two groups, which notably showed no significant differences between them. The first group also expressed more “selfless concern” during the testing period.

Is it just me or do these experiments seem rather silly? Why wouldn’t you be more forgiving of a person rather than a thing posing as a person (the recorder). Similarly, the connection one has with a friend is usually stronger than one has with a “topic” with which one is concerned.

Churches defaulting on their mortgages.

Mortgages on houses of worship once seemed like safe bets for lenders, but with parishioners tithing less and less in these tough times, many churches are now struggling to stay current on loan payments.

I wonder how the gospel of prosperity folks are doing?

This in contrast to the recent Swiss ban on building any new minarets:

The minaret of the new Grand Mosque of Marseille, whose cornerstone will be laid here in April, will be silent — no muezzin, live or recorded, will disturb the neighborhood with the call to prayer. Instead, the minaret will flash a beam of light for a couple of minutes, five times a day.

Normally, the light would be green, for the color of Islam. But Marseille is a port, and green is reserved for signals to ships at sea. Red? No, the firefighters have reserved red.

Instead, said Noureddine Cheikh, the head of the Marseille Mosque Association, the light will almost surely be purple — a rather nightclubby look for such an elegant building.

…Youcef Mammeri, a writer on Islam in France and member of the Joint Council of Muslims of Marseille, says that the debates over minarets, burqas and national identity have angered many French-born Muslims and brought them together in a defensive circle.

This is a tough call. On the one hand, I’m all for religious tolerance. But on the other hand it seems that historical tradition should be respected, too. But then that also cuts both ways. Take Spain and its transformation from Islamic to Catholic rule. If we just go by “who was there first”, this would often thwart the natural flow of history, whether that “flow” came at the end of a sword or not. If Maryland had been settled by Muslims but over the past 50 years a vibrant Christian minority had flourished, should church towers and bells be banned in deference to the over 200 year history of a predominantly Muslim populace? Or if Maryland had been predominantly Catholic (which it was) but now Orthodox Jews were in the ascendancy, should synagogues and payos be banned?

The sad truth is that tensions between different cultures (even those that share the same religion) is practically inevitable especially when there’s a lack of sensitivity and understanding on both sides.

When do doctors or other medical professionals enter into prayer with their patients? In a study published in a recent issue of the Souther Medical Journal sociologists from Brandeis and Rice Universities examined patient requests for prayer.

The researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 30 academic pediatricians and pediatric oncologists at 13 leading academic medical centers around the country. They found that families most frequently raise the topic of prayer in response to a seriously ill or dying child.

The study found that pediatricians respond to requests for prayer in one of four ways: they participate in the prayers; they accommodate the prayers but don’t participate; they reframe the prayers, or they direct the families and patients to other religious and spiritual resources like hospital chaplains.

Huh? The warden allegedly turned inmates away from church services for punitive reasons, such as their hair being too long.

The warden at Virginia’s largest women’s prison is retiring amid allegations the prison discriminated against gay inmates and denied others access to religious services.

This article from ABC News, discusses the findings of Oxford anthropoligist Harvey Whitehouse’s study of religion. He was drawn to a puzzle when comparing different religious rituals. On the one hand there are the extreme cases such as

sacred fire dances performed in New Guinea, where in order to commune with their ancestors men enter a trance state wearing masks decorated with blood drawn agonisingly from their own tongues.

By contrast, the most extreme ritual a Christian is likely to engage in is being dunked during baptism. Why do some religions have rituals that are so much more traumatic than others?

Read the rest of this entry

[Photo: Eros Hoagland for The New York Times]

From the NY Times, a wonderful photo-documentary on the rebuilding of a Christian monastery in Iraq, St. Elijah’s.

I hope that when the dust settles and the bullets stop (or mostly stop), Iraq will be a destination spot for people interested in studying antiquity. There’s so much history there, religious and otherwise.

From the NY Times:

Newly homeless families will bunk here for two weeks before moving to another house of worship — and then another and another….

In the Oneg Shabbat room at Temple Isaiah in Lafayette, children hooked angels on a tall Christmas tree.

I participated once with a team of churches that alternated providing a dinner and shelter once a week, as I recall.  So often homeless people are invisible. These rotating shelters help parishoners gain a short glimpse of homelessness. Sadly, nearly every semester I have at least once student explain to me that they are either homeless or “housing challenged”. I wonder how many of their peers realize they have homeless students in their midst.

This is a topic that interests me a great deal. There was a thread on Andrew Sullivan’s blog that I found intriguing. It was prompted by Pope Benedict’s recension of the prior excommunication of a schismatic bishop. (More posts on the current situation coming up.)  Any reasonable person would call this bishop a holocaust denier. But that part is an aside. The substance of the post is about faith and doubt. Sullivan writes:

… the internal wrestling never ends. The search for truth must always be first; and religion is nothing if it is not true. Which is why doubt can never be a danger. Banishing doubt is the danger.