This just shared by those lovable geeks @freakonomics:

Take a closer look. Scan-ti-bodies? Scanty Bodies.

Checkout the Freakonomics folks over on The New York Times.

Religious tolerance in Bahrain? Perhaps. For the 36 Jews living there, at least in 2009.

In the tense landscape of the Middle East, there is little room left for Jewish Arabs, a tiny minority in this country as well as in places like Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia. But in Bahrain, the king, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, has taken unprecedented steps for an Arab leader to show his support for his dwindling Jewish population. Last year, he appointed a Jewish woman, Houda Ezra Ebrahim Nonoo, as ambassador to the United States, the first Jewish ambassador posted abroad by any Arab country.

The Shiites, though, apparently aren’t so sure about how tolerant the atmosphere really is.

There is also some resentment at the king’s support for the small Jewish community. Bahrain is hot with sectarian tensions: the king, a Sunni Muslim, is accused of discriminating against Shiite Muslims, who make up a majority of the native population. Shiites are barred from almost all positions in the military and security services, and they say they are not given the same employment and education opportunities as their Sunni neighbors.

Shiites complain that the 36 Jews are treated better than they are, and that the king’s Jewish outreach is intended to make Bahrain appear to be a tolerant society, papering over the systemic discrimination they say they experience.

A news item from CNN.Com in 2009.

Father Theodore Heck, believed to be the oldest Benedictine monk in the world, died Wednesday at the age of 108, his abbey in Indiana announced. Born in Iowa in 1901, Heck was less than a month shy of celebrating his 80th anniversary as a priest.

He reminds me of Father Winance who taught at the Claremont Graduate School. Nuns and monks seem to have an edge on longevity, yes? Evidently Father Heck took up Spanish at 99 and computers at 100.

I’ve had students go on their own to a worship service outside their own tradition, but here’s another spin on the same assignment.

Earlier this semester, Soni started a weekly “Souljourn” to explore that religious diversity, bringing students of different faiths to churches of different faiths, from Hare Krishna to Tao to Pentecostal.

On Sunday about 10 a.m., four Wiccans, a Buddhist, a Sufi and an agnostic filed up the rickety stairs to the balcony of the Virgin Mary Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Hundreds of congregants filled the pews, many men wearing suit coats, women wrapped in gauzy white scarves. They chanted joyously with the choir in Amharic, tended restless children and clapped the deep detonations of the kubaro drum.

On sfgate.com, the findings of a recent study from Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life explaining the fluidity of religious affiliation in America makes sense to me. Some of their findings.

Only 23 and 24 percent of former Catholics and Protestants, respectively, became unaffiliated because they thought science disproves religion. By contrast, 55 and 53 percent of former Catholics and Protestants, respectively, became unaffiliated because they believe that religious people are hypocritical, judgmental or insincere. The unaffiliated account for 16 percent of the adult population, even though only 7 percent of the population was raised without religion.

“The study shows the continued rise of the spiritual-but-not-religious category,” said Stephen Prothero, who teaches in the department of religion at Boston University and is the author of “Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know – and Doesn’t.”

The Pew site is a goldmine of information. It’s well worth a few hours of browsing!

Will getting a transplant from a murderer make you evil? More people willing to refuse transplant from a criminal.

A poem by W.S. Merwin, Before the Flood:

Why did he promise me
that we would build ourselves
an ark all by ourselves
out in back of the house
on New York Avenue
in Union City New Jersey
to the singing of the streetcars
after the story
of Noah whom nobody
believed about the waters
that would rise over everything
when I told my father
I wanted us to build
an ark of our own there
in the back yard under
the kitchen could we do that
he told me that we could
I want to I said and will we
he promised me that we would
why did he promise that
I wanted us to start then
nobody will believe us
I said that we are building
an ark because the rains
are coming and that was true
nobody ever believed
we would build an ark there
nobody would believe
that the waters were coming

A reminder about the connection between notions of immortality, obituaries and Aristotle’s view about assessing a whole life. Franklin’s view offers us shades (pun intended) of Plato, too. When Socrates says that philosophers especially should be in training for death during their lives, he means, in part, that the best is yet to come, i.e., a time when the self is unencumbered by the body. This can only happen fully after death.

In a letter penned to the grieving Elizabeth Hubbart, his brother John’s stepdaughter, Benjamin Franklin wrote, “A man is not completely born until he is dead.” He was trying to make her feel better about the death of her stepfather by saying that, as a soul now freed from his body, he was just getting started. What Elizabeth thought of as a life completed, Franklin portrayed as a mere rehearsal for the “real life” that is immortality. God gives bodies to all of us wandering souls for a little while, to experience pleasure, learn some tricks. Eventually, these bodies become painful or sad or just too gross to maintain, and are shuffled off while we get back to the business of being eternal. For Franklin, then, life is never done.
I can see how this sentiment might be comforting to a believer, but for those of us living on the other side of faith, the question of what constitutes a completed life is still an open one. Aristotle thought of life as a sum of its total actions that couldn’t be judged until those actions came to an end. This might be reassuring to those hovering about the frustrated middle of their lives, harshly judging their progress. Not to worry, says Aristotle — it ain’t over till it’s over. And it isn’t really over until you’ve been judged by other people at a point when you can no longer prepare a defense, be reformed, pay restitution, be rehabilitated. Judgment completes life.

“Appalling“? That’s an understatement.