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Category: Religion

#MeToo in the monastery: A Chinese abbot’s fall stirs questions on Buddhism’s path

#MeToo in the monastery: A Chinese abbot’s fall stirs questions on Buddhism’s path

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The New York Times reports: Over the past two decades, religion in China has boomed, and no faith has benefited more than Buddhism. The number of temples has tripled, monks and abbots have become well-known public figures, and China has used the faith to build ties around the world, sending out nuns and monks on good-will missions. The person most closely associated with this revival is the Venerable Xuecheng, a charismatic monk who was fast-tracked for success. He became abbot…

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China has placed hundreds of thousands of Muslims in cultural extermination camps

China has placed hundreds of thousands of Muslims in cultural extermination camps

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The New York Times reports: On the edge of a desert in far western China, an imposing building sits behind a fence topped with barbed wire. Large red characters on the facade urge people to learn Chinese, study law and acquire job skills. Guards make clear that visitors are not welcome. Inside, hundreds of ethnic Uighur Muslims spend their days in a high-pressure indoctrination program, where they are forced to listen to lectures, sing hymns praising the Chinese Communist Party…

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Conservative media move to front line of battle to undermine Pope Francis

Conservative media move to front line of battle to undermine Pope Francis

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Reuters reports: Last March, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano dined on the outskirts of Rome at the home of a conservative Italian Catholic journalist. Over pasta, fish and white wine, the prelate poured out his concern for the future of the Roman Catholic Church. It was the start of about five months of contacts and collaboration between Vigano and several conservative journalists and media outlets that would lead to one of the greatest crises for the Church in modern times. In…

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Catholics call for mass resignation of U.S. bishops

Catholics call for mass resignation of U.S. bishops

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Following the release of the Pennsylvania grand jury report on the sexual abuse of over 1,000 children by 301 priests, and following a similar scandal earlier this year in Chile that led to its Catholic bishops’ collective resignation, a statement by Catholic theologians, educators, parishioners, and lay leaders says: After years of suppressed truth, the unreserved decisiveness of the Chilean bishops’ resignations communicated to the faithful a message that Catholics in the United States have yet to hear, with an…

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Conservative religious leaders are denouncing Trump immigration policies

Conservative religious leaders are denouncing Trump immigration policies

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The New York Times reports: Conservative religious leaders who have long preached about the sanctity of the family are now issuing sharp rebukes of the Trump administration for immigration policies that tear families apart or leave them in danger. The criticism came after recent moves by the administration to separate children from their parents at the border, and to deny asylum on a routine basis to victims of domestic abuse and gang violence. Some of the religious leaders are the…

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Evangelical minister warns about dangerous alliance between American evangelicals and the Republican Party

Evangelical minister warns about dangerous alliance between American evangelicals and the Republican Party

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Mother Jones reports: The past four decades have seen an ever-tightening alliance between American evangelicals and the Republican Party, and few have played as pivotal a role in fostering that coupling as Reverend Rob Schenck. The evangelical minister from Buffalo, New York, gained national notoriety in the 1990s as a fervent anti-abortion activist who orchestrated shocking stunts to promote his cause, including one in which an aborted fetus was thrust in the face of then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton. His keen…

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The spiritual part of our brains — religion not required

The spiritual part of our brains — religion not required

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Ephrat Livni writes: Scientists seek to quantify everything—even the ineffable. And so the human search for meaning recently took a physical turn as Columbia and Yale University researchers isolated the place in our brains that processes spiritual experiences. In a new study, published in Cerebral Cortex (paywall) on May 29, neuroscientists explain how they generated “personally relevant” spiritual experiences in a diverse group of subjects and scanned their brains while these experiences were happening. The results indicate that there is…

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A triumph for women and for Ireland

A triumph for women and for Ireland

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Barbara Wesel writes: It is such a resounding victory that campaigners in Ireland are weeping with joy. After a tense last few days when the referendum seemed too close to call, it turned out to be a landslide result. Irish people voted overwhelmingly in favor of abolishing the total abortion ban in the constitution. And with this amendment, the last part of an oppressive system that subjugated women in Ireland for centuries has gone. They have achieved what has long…

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Rev William Barber and the Poor People’s Campaign

Rev William Barber and the Poor People’s Campaign

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The Guardian reports: In his prayer at the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem last week, a prayer delivered against a backdrop of violence in Gaza, the evangelical pastor Robert Jeffress said Donald Trump was a moral leader who stood “on the right side of you, O God”. Half a world away, outside the Capitol in Washington, the Rev William Barber led a moment of silence for the 60 Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers. As one group of faith…

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Islam in Eastern Europe

Islam in Eastern Europe

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Jacob Mikanowski writes: There has never been an Eastern Europe without Islam. Eastern Europe owes its existence to the intermingling of languages, of cultures, and, perhaps above all, of faiths. It is the meeting place of the Catholic West and the Orthodox East, of Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewry, of militant Islam and crusading Christianity, of Byzantine mystics and Sufi saints. Once, this plurality would have been obvious. A visitor to Vilnius in the 17th century would have heard six languages…

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Pastor who said Jews are going to hell led prayer at Jerusalem embassy opening

Pastor who said Jews are going to hell led prayer at Jerusalem embassy opening

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The New York Times reports: A Dallas evangelical pastor who once said that Jewish people are going to hell and a megachurch televangelist who claimed that Hitler was part of God’s plan to return Jews to Israel both played prominent roles on Monday in the opening ceremony of the new American Embassy in Jerusalem. Robert Jeffress, who spoke at President Trump’s private inaugural prayer service and is the pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas, delivered a prayer at the…

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Muslims recoil at a French proposal to change the Quran

Muslims recoil at a French proposal to change the Quran

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The Atlantic reports: A manifesto published in the French daily Le Parisien on April 21—signed by some 300 prominent intellectuals and politicians, including former President Nicolas Sarkozy and former Prime Minister Manuel Valls—made a shocking demand. Arguing that the Quran incites violence, it insisted that “the verses of the Quran calling for murder and punishment of Jews, Christians, and nonbelievers be struck to obsolescence by religious authorities,” so that “no believer can refer to a sacred text to commit a…

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Reflective and unreflective atheists

Reflective and unreflective atheists

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Patrick Freyne writes: John Gray is a self-described atheist who thinks that prominent advocates of atheism have made non-belief seem intolerant, uninspiring and dull. At the end of the first chapter of his new book, Seven Types of Atheism, he concludes that “the organised atheism of the present century is mostly a media phenomenon and best appreciated as a type of entertainment”. He laughs when I remind him of this sick burn. “I wrote the book partly as a riposte…

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Despite his ties to porn stars and Playboy models, Trump’s white Christian nationalist supporters remain loyal

Despite his ties to porn stars and Playboy models, Trump’s white Christian nationalist supporters remain loyal

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Andrew L. Whitehead, Joseph O. Baker and Samuel L. Perry write: How much a U.S. voter feared Muslims was as significant in predicting who voted for Trump as Christian nationalism. Overall the strongest predictors of Trump voting were the usual suspects of political identity and race, followed closely by Islamophobia and Christian nationalism. Many voters believed, and presumably still believe, that regardless of his personal piety (or lack thereof), Trump would defend what they saw as the country’s Christian heritage…

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