"
IN THE COURTYARD OF THE BELOVED is a visual and aural portrait of
Nizamuddin Auliya Dargah, a Sufi shrine in New Delhi, India. Made from over 18,000 still images and ambient sounds recorded on-site, rapid-fire bursts of kaleidoscopic imagery assemble into fractured collages where a moment expands outwards and then converges back into itself, fleshing out a three-dimensional rendering of place."
posted by gman
on Oct 7, 2010 -
12 comments
In a survey of
Americans' religious knowledge conducted by the Pew Research Center, atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons scored higher than evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics on questions about the core teachings, history and leading figures of major world religions, leading the surveyors to conclude that "large numbers of Americans are uninformed about the tenets, practices, history and leading figures of major faith traditions – including their own."
posted by Houyhnhnm
on Sep 28, 2010 -
116 comments
For millions of addicts around the world, Alcoholics Anonymous's basic text - informally known as the Big Book - is the Bible. And as they're about to find out, the Bible was edited. After being hidden away for nearly 70 years and then auctioned twice, the original manuscript by AA co-founder Bill Wilson is about to become public for the first time next week, complete with edits by Wilson-picked commenters that reveal a profound debate in 1939 about how overtly to talk about God.
posted by Joe Beese
on Sep 22, 2010 -
76 comments
In a five part series he wrote a few years ago, blogger J. Brad Hicks breaks down how, in the mid-1960s, the Republican party made a conscious decision to rebrand themselves as the party of Christians, and in doing so, how they had to shift the ideology of the churches to what he calls a "
false gospel".
[more inside]
posted by quin
on Sep 15, 2010 -
208 comments
As reported on NPR's All Tech Considered ("Tech" and "Religion"?) on 9/13. "In a world where Google has put every bit of information at our fingertips, some people are now demanding less information when they surf the Internet" by using
religion-based search engines. And folks are worried that Goohoo results might be biased? (SNPRL - Single Nat'l Public Radio Link)
[more inside]
posted by Man with Lantern
on Sep 14, 2010 -
58 comments
"On September 11, 2001, thousands of first responders heroically rushed to the scene and saved tens of thousands of lives. More than 400 of those first responders did not make it out alive. In rushing into those burning buildings, not one of them asked 'What God do you pray to?' 'What beliefs do you hold?'"
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg
has recently
defended the planned
Cordoba Initiative Islamic Community Center and Mosque to be built near Ground Zero
against critics. Yesterday, after the City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission
voted to
allow the demolition of a building that would be replaced by the center, Mr. Bloomberg gave a
speech on Governor's Island (the
location seems to have been deliberately chosen) in which he
eloquently defended religious freedom. (YT:
Video)
(Previously on MeFi)
posted by zarq
on Aug 4, 2010 -
315 comments
The Anti-Defamation League has been
tracking religious extremism for several decades, including anti-Islamic violence in the United States after 9/11. Nonetheless, the organization
joined right-wing opposition earlier this week to the construction of
Cordoba House, a 13-story Muslim community center and mosque that may be built two blocks away from the site of the former World Trade Center. The ADL's alignment with calls for
"refudiation" by Republican celebrities Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, along with other members of the GOP who are
ramping up angry sentiments in voters during an election year, have puzzled and angered religious, political and cultural figures of various stripes, particularly within New York City itself.
[more inside]
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Aug 1, 2010 -
446 comments
“There’s a tremendous amount of anxiety among religious traditionalists that when you take one step toward egalitarianism, the floodgates are open and everything that seemed self-evident will no longer be. Men go to work, and women raise children. If you undermine that, you have lost your whole universe.”The Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements of Judaism have been ordaining women as rabbis for decades, but the religion's most traditional sect, the Orthodox, remains a lone, minority holdout against egalitarianism. Last year, Orthodox Rabbi Avraham "Avi" Weiss (political
activist and founder of the
controversial, liberal, "Open Orthodox"
Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Yeshiva in New York)
tried to shake things up by ordaining the first female American Orthodox rabbi.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Jul 31, 2010 -
35 comments
In the late 1950s, psychologist Milton Rokeach was gripped by an eccentric plan. He gathered three psychiatric patients, each with the delusion that they were Jesus Christ, to live together for two years in Ypsilanti State Hospital to see if their beliefs would change. Vaughan Bell
tells the story of one of the weirdest experiments in the history of psychology. (
via)
posted by The Mouthchew
on May 27, 2010 -
57 comments
The Inglehart Values Map , based on the World Values Survey, visualizes the strong correlation of values in different cultures. Countries are clustered in a remarkably predictable way, with great cultural continuity across the English-speaking world.
posted by ms.codex
on May 9, 2010 -
21 comments
In 2009, four Buddhist nuns (Bhikkunis) were
secretly ordained in Australia - the first ever ordination of Bhikkunis in Australia, and a first for the
Thai Forest tradition anywhere. London-born
Ajahn Brahm, a
long-time supporter of women's equality in Buddhism, facilitated the ordination. For this he was
expelled from his community, the
Wat Pa Phong Sangha, and his monastery's status was
revoked. This
video summarizes the conflict, and is possibly the first use of the Downfall meme related to Buddhism. This March,
more nuns were ordained in the UK for the first time since the Australia controversy, but they're
still not equal to male monks.
This blog post discusses sexism, fundamentalism, and the conflict between East and West.
The modern opposition to bhikkhuni ordination is no ancient Buddhist tradition. It can be traced no earlier, so far as I am aware, than the abhorrent 1928 ruling against bhikkhuni in Thailand, made by monks who thought it reasonable to arrest nuns and throw them in jail for ordaining. [more inside]
posted by desjardins
on Apr 14, 2010 -
72 comments
Is Facebook chametz? An interview with two rabbis about their
Facebook group, encouraging Jews to consider giving up Facebook for Passover
next week. While the word
"chametz" strictly refers only to leavened bread, which is prohibited during Passover, the group is inspired by a Chassidic interpretation that connects the leavening of bread to an "over-inflated sense of self."
posted by albrecht
on Mar 24, 2010 -
77 comments
Women were not allowed to speak at a meeting held to determine the fate of suspended principal John Hartwig of
St. John’s Lutheran School in Baraboo, WI. While women are normally not allowed to vote at such meetings, this is the first time in recent history that the St. John’s Council President exercised his authority to keep females from even speaking. Women who wanted to ask questions were told to write them on a piece of paper and have a man read them aloud. Hartwig was suspended for distributing a document questioning Lutheran doctrine that says that women should not hold authority over men.
posted by Consonants Without Vowels
on Mar 24, 2010 -
129 comments
