At first glance it appears like some kind of giant family tree, and in a way it is. The family tree of world religions. You won’t be able to tell anything from this tiny picture, so here are a couple of ways you can view it.
The seventh Parliament of the World’s Religions will be held this week in Toronto, November 2-6. For anyone who relishes jubilant interaction with a multiplicity of religions and beliefs from every part of the world—this is THE event. There’s something heavenly about it.
Whilst much of the world is pre-occupied with protesting against Donald Trump, as worthy as that may be, I’d like to illustrate what real oppression looks like around the world.
Being aware of our favorite news sources’ biases is as important as keeping up with events around us, probably more important. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”
Over ten years ago, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt wanted to figure out why there were such great political and religious divides in all cultures. This little chart summarizes some big insights Haidt and his researchers uncovered.
Akilah Sasilva, Taurean C. Sanderlin, DeEbony Groves, and Joe R. Perez. These young people
should be going about their lives in relative anonymity, attending
school, working, and dreaming. And unless one of these individuals is a
friend or a loved one, you should not be seeing these images. But here we are again. Innocent people gunned down at a Waffle House in Nashville, Tennessee, and we’re viewing people’s images we would not have seen otherwise.
A tearful little boy approached Pope Francis
last week with a question about his atheist dad who had recently died. Traditional Christian doctrine teaches that belief in God through Jesus
is essential to life after death. But Pope Francis spoke a more personal
truth about God to this distraught child, who was escorted up to the
Pope after he could not speak his question into a microphone. “Is Dad in heaven?” the boy asked the Pope, whispering in his ear.
Toni Morrison wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye, at age 39. For
a long time she had wanted to read a book about “the most vulnerable
person in society…and it wasn’t around, so I started writing it,” she
told Hilton Als in a 2014 interview. Ms. Morrison’s most vulnerable person: female, child, black. I live in the opposite end of that vulnerability spectrum: male, middle-aged, white. I have been broke and unemployed, but I’ve never experienced the abject vulnerability of a little girl in South Sudan.
189:4.3 (2025.4) A little before three o’clock this Sunday morning, when the first signs of day began to appear in the east, five of the women started out for the tomb of Jesus. They had prepared an abundance of special embalming lotions, and they carried many linen bandages with them. It was their purpose more thoroughly to give the body of Jesus its death anointing and more carefully to wrap it up with the new bandages.
189:4.4 (2025.5) The women who went on this mission of anointing Jesus’ body were: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of the Alpheus twins, Salome the mother of the Zebedee brothers, Joanna the wife of Chuza, and Susanna the daughter of Ezra of Alexandria. 189:4.5 (2025.6) It was about half past three o’clock when the five women, laden with their ointments, arrived before the empty tomb.
The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion is Jonathan Haidt’s study of how and why people along a spectrum from extreme liberal to extreme conservative viewpoints coalesce around certain value systems. To get us going, on the first page he presents these two hypothetical tales:
I’m going to tell you a brief story. Pause after you read it and decide whether the people in the story did anything morally wrong.A family’s dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this.If you are like most of the well-educated people in my studies, you felt an initial flash of disgust, but you hesitated before saying the family had done anything morally wrong. After all, the dog was dead already, so they didn’t hurt it, right?