religious studies
Where is religiosity growing, where is it receding, and what does that tell us?: Sociologists
The data that made nobody happy Pew’s 2015 report projected that by 2050, the global share of religiously unaffiliated people will decline from 16 percent to 13 percent. Not because people are deconverting less, but because secular populations have far fewer children.... What does the West owe to Christianity and Islam?: Catholic Social Teaching
Pray and work In 529, Benedict of Nursia established a monastery at Monte Cassino and wrote a Rule. Welcome every stranger as Christ. Feed the hungry. Tend the sick. Preserve the books. Work with your hands.... What does the West owe to Christianity and Islam?: Complexity historians
The monk who smuggled numerals In 976, al-Khwarizmi’s work on Hindu-Arabic numerals reached a Catalan monastery through Gerbert of Aurillac, a monk who had studied in Islamic Iberia. Gerbert became Pope Sylvester II.... What does the West owe to Christianity and Islam?: Civilizational inheritors
The line from Aquinas Aquinas died in 1274. He synthesized Aristotelian logic with Christian theology, established natural law, articulated just war doctrine, and laid groundwork for the scientific method.... What does the West owe to Christianity and Islam?: The Story
The surgeon who doesn’t know In 1088, students in Bologna organized themselves into a universitas — a legal corporation with elected rectors and the right to grant degrees. The model spread to Paris, Oxford, Cambridge. Every one was a Church institution. The faculty were clergy.... What is God?: Mystics
The thing that happens We are not going to argue about it. We are going to describe it. You are sitting — or walking, or washing dishes, or in one documented case being struck by lightning — and the boundary between you and everything else dissolves. Not metaphorically.... What makes learning about the ultimate easier in the modern era, and what makes it harder?: Integralists
The spectrum In 1977, Ken Wilber proposed something either outrageously presumptuous or quietly obvious: the world’s wisdom traditions are not in contradiction. They are describing different stages of the same developmental sequence.... What makes learning about the ultimate easier in the modern era, and what makes it harder?: Religious traditionalists
Thirty years under the Rule Our abbot entered the monastery at twenty-three. He has prayed the same liturgical hours, in the same chapel, with the same brothers, through three decades of silence and chanting and manual labor and the slow erosion of every spiritual fantasy he... What makes learning about the ultimate easier in the modern era, and what makes it harder?: The Story
Ten thousand people in silence In 2003, a Burmese meditation teacher named S. N. Goenka filled Madison Square Garden with ten thousand people sitting in silence. Most had found their way there through a website.... What is enlightenment?: Skeptics
The epistemological problem In 1901, the Canadian psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke published Cosmic Consciousness, cataloguing thirty-six cases of higher awareness. His evidence consisted entirely of first-person reports. The book was a bestseller.... What is enlightenment?: Neuroscientists
Off the chart In 2004, we put Matthieu Ricard in a scanner. A molecular biologist who left the Pasteur Institute to become a Tibetan monk, 50,000 hours of practice.... Does the universe have a purpose?: Materialists
The love letter to an empty house In 1977, Voyager 1 launched carrying a golden record with greetings in fifty-five languages, music by Bach and Chuck Berry, and a diagram showing how to find Earth.... Is tradition a resource, a trap, or something else?: Dialecticians
The tea ceremony changed with every generation Okakura published The Book of Tea in 1906 describing a ceremony already transformed multiple times since Sen no Rikyu’s fifteenth-century version.... No other choice. If it is indeed wrong to say out loud that I do not trust Jews anymore, then that will just have to be something I learn to live with like I do genocide, ethnic cleansing, pedophilia and the deliberate murder of world central kitchen and other aid workers. Israel is a savage and degenerate ally, a child killing lying thieving nation state , a menace to all of humanity and friend to no one...Especially Americans!
To me, there is a difference between stating facts about the State of Israel and generalizations about Jews. I am against Zionism as displayed in the Israeli government, but I am not against Jews.... The Born Again Gospel
The Born Again Gospel You are a created being, made in the image of a Holy God but, no one on Earth can be Holy so, God sent His Only Begotten Son Jesus, to take the punishment for our sins by dying on a cross.... Something clicked while I was writing this and I had to share it with you. The Greek word for "meek" was literally used to describe a trained warhorse — not a broken animal. Power under control. That's what Jesus was actually talking about....