Category: Timely

Religion Doesn’t Always Work for Mammon

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Ruben Sanchez: Religion Clause recently informed us of a court ruling that states that the United Postal Service (USPS) does not need to accommodate a Seventh Day Adventist employee’s request to have every Saturday off. The 8th Circuit held that if Saturday leave were granted, such a demand, made under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, would impose an undue hardship on the company, violate its collective bargaining agreement, or challenge its seniority system.” Continue Reading →

Religion Doesn’t Always Work for Mammon

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Ruben Sanchez: Religion Clause recently informed us of a court ruling that states that the United Postal Service (USPS) does not need to accommodate a Seventh Day Adventist employee’s request to have every Saturday off. The 8th Circuit held that if Saturday leave were granted, such a demand, made under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, would impose an undue hardship on the company, violate its collective bargaining agreement, or challenge its seniority system.” Continue Reading →

My Catholic Conscience

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We’ve been here before. And no, it didn’t work then either.

by Jon O’Brien

Like others, I am deeply concerned about recent moves in Congress that would restrict access to reproductive healthcare services, especially for poor women. The situation reminds me of other experiments where a few people with extreme views sought to pass policy that impacted a significantly wider group of people—with devastating consequences. Below, I will recount how the hierarchy of the Catholic church hijacked a process that was on the verge of overturning the complete ban on contraception. But today, in the U.S. Congress, an antichoice cabal in the Republican Party is seeking to prevent poor women accessing federally funded family planning and other reproductive health services.  There are currently three bills that would do just that: the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” (HR 3), the “Protect Life Act” (HR 358) and the “Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act” (HR 217). They, along with the budget which passed the House and did not include crucial family planning funding will severely impact the lives of millions of American families. As a Catholic, the fact that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has supported these attacks on healthcare services for poor women adds insult to injury. Continue Reading →

Inspired, Yes, but Divinely?

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A review of Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life

by Clint Rainey

A few scientists and believers once naïvely clasped hands in hope that the evolutionary explanation for belief in God would signal a détente in the science-religion war. Belief could satisfy science by being instinctual, as Dean Hamer’s The God Gene and others argued, while also satisfying religion by being divinely set in motion. This détente, we know now, was a pipedream. Since being etiologically explained as instinct, belief has suffered at the hands of an army precision-trained in the scientific method.

Attempting to deliver the deathblow in a new book is Jesse Bering, an evolutionary psychologist and director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University, Belfast. Articulate and amusing, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life is a coupe de grâce as much as it is rage, arguing that belief, for modern man, is indeed an adaptation—a crucial one, up to a point—but that it’s become a vestigial organ of the mind, uselessly outmoded. Continue Reading →

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States of Devotion, a publication of NYU’s Hemispheric Institute edited by Ann Pellegrini, has a new “dossier” of articles that address same-sex marriage in the U.S. Pellegrini’s introduction reads:

That same Christian Century article contrasts the rising support for gay marriage, especially among younger Americans, with public attitudes towards legalized abortion. The survey found that support for abortion held steady over the past five years, but so did opposition to it. More significantly, there was no demonstrable generation gap, as there is on the same-sex marriage issue. That is, both support for and opposition to legalized abortion held steady across age groups.

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Transatlantic Efforts towards Interfaith Understanding

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Catch NYU’s own Jeremy Walton, moderator extraordinaire, at tomorrow’s “A Rabbi and an Imam Walk Into a Forum” event at the Austrian Cultural Forum (and one of the nicest looking embassies in the hemisphere).  The panelists will include Imam Muhammad Shamsi Ali (Imam of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York), Rabbi Marc Schneier (Founder and President, Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, New York), and Ilja Sichrovsky (Founder of the Muslim-Jewish Conference, Vienna). All the details can be found at the Austrian Cultural Forum website. Continue Reading →

Incitement Double Standards

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by Matthew Berkman

This article is reposted in whole from Foreign Policy.  The original article can be found here.

This week, in response to the highly publicized murder of a Jewish family in the West Bank settlement of Itamar, a group of 27 U.S. senators signed a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urging her to press Palestinian leaders to end “incitement directed against Jews and Israel within the Palestinian media, mosques, and schools.” According to the letter, the grisly killings in Itamar (for which no suspects, Palestinian or otherwise, have been identified), “is a sobering reminder that words matter, and that Palestinian incitement against Jews and Israel can lead to violence and terror.”

As evidence for the allegation of pervasive anti-Jewish incitement in Palestinian society, the letter cites a recent, official ceremony honoring Delal Mughrabi, a perpetrator of the 1978 coastal road massacre in Israel, as well as a payment of financial compensation made by the Palestinian Authority to the family of a deceased terror suspect.

Such actions are deserving of condemnation. But if it is indeed the case that “words matter” -and if the elimination of violent and dehumanizing rhetoric is, as the letter says, “critical to establishing the conditions [for] a secure and lasting peace”-then what can explain the senators’ silence on the veritable carnival of hate and racist incitement against Arabs and Palestinians that has lately engulfed Israeli society? Continue Reading →

Acknowledging the Lives of Religious Texts

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Jeremy Walton moderated a panel sponsored by NYU’s Institute for the Production of Knowledge last week.  The event inaugurated a new series by Princeton University Press, “The Lives of Great Religious Books,” and gathered Martin E. Marty (Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison), Donald Lopez (The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography), and Vanessa Ochs (currently working on a “biography” of the Passover Haggadah for the series) for a discussion of these and other foundational texts — a discussion that also shed light on the series’ approach to the discipline of religious studies and its conception of  “texts.”  Walton writes in his summary of the event, at The Immanent Frame:

For many years, Religious Studies was defined as a hermeneutical discipline based upon great texts, but the typical disciplinary approach was to treat the texts as hermetic, self-contained wholes upon which the scholar expounds and expands. With this series, however, we are witnessing a new willingness on the part of scholars in Religious Studies to approach the dynamic relationship between theological treatises and their social environments, between texts and contexts, as it were.

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Allah's Name

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Zeinab Yusuf Saiwalla: In Muslim majority Malaysia, the government recently refused to allow the distribution of tens of thousands of bibles that were printed in the country’s main language – Bahasa Malaysia. The controversy is not new; in 2009 the Malaysian Home Ministry prosecuted The Herald, Malaysia’s sole Catholic publication, and threatened it with the loss of its printing license for the use of Allah in describing the Christian God in its Malay-language section.

The Herald defended its usage of the term Allah, arguing that it was backed by a centuries-old tradition within the Arabic language where non-Muslims in Arab countries used Allah to mean God. Continue Reading →

Allah’s Name

Posted on by

Zeinab Yusuf Saiwalla: In Muslim majority Malaysia, the government recently refused to allow the distribution of tens of thousands of bibles that were printed in the country’s main language – Bahasa Malaysia. The controversy is not new; in 2009 the Malaysian Home Ministry prosecuted The Herald, Malaysia’s sole Catholic publication, and threatened it with the loss of its printing license for the use of Allah in describing the Christian God in its Malay-language section.

The Herald defended its usage of the term Allah, arguing that it was backed by a centuries-old tradition within the Arabic language where non-Muslims in Arab countries used Allah to mean God. Continue Reading →