One of those two religions is Mormonism:   http://time.com/dateonomics/   The article is a tad bit long, but it’s very thought-provoking.   What do you think?  Does this ring true to you?   Thanks to Ryan Campbell for bringing this article from Time to my notice.   Posted from Erfurt, Germany     Read more

    All the way back in the 1990s, I wrote a few lines in the book Offenders for a Word about Christian polygamy:   The sixth century Arab Christian kings of Lakhm and Ghassan were polygamists, for instance, as were the contemporary Christians of Ethiopia. Pope Clement VII, faced with the threat of a continent-dividing divorce, considered bigamy as a solution to the problem of Henry VIII. Was he, with such thoughts, flirting with becoming a non-Christian? Did Martin Luther cease... Read more

      One of the sessions that we attended today focused on “Authority in Islam.”   I was most interested in a paper by Johannes Rosenbaum, a young German scholar who recently finished his doctoral dissertation. He focused on contemporary Muslim “advice manuals” from South Asia (essentially India/Pakistan)—written by Islamic clerics but also, sometimes, by physicians—as a window into contemporary Islamic thinking on marriage. It’s an interesting and fresh approach, at least in my experience. He is right in... Read more

    Faith-promoting folk tales abound among Latter-day Saints.   Did you know, for example, that Alice Cooper and Steve Martin are Mormons?  Have you heard that Albert Einstein once said that “Next to me, James Talmage is the greatest scientist in the world”?   But we have no monopoly on such bogus anecdotes.   And, for what it’s worth, for example, I’ve observed similar things among such subgroups as atheists, gays, and so forth.   In any event, speaking of Einstein... Read more

    http://www.aish.com/jw/s/A-Modern-Day-Oskar-Schindler.html   I’m thinking about this one.  Quite seriously.   Should I join in?  Should you?   Do such efforts reward and fund ISIS?   Will such payments actually encourage the taking of more hostages?   On the other hand, can we simply sit back and do nothing?   The plaque shown above reads as follows:   Oskar Schindler saved more than 1200 Jews from certain death during the National Socialist terror.  From November 1945 until May 1950,... Read more

      I might quibble at one or two points, but I share his overall concern — regarding science and other areas, too:   http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/science/the-widening-world-of-hand-picked-truths.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&_r=0   Posted from Erfurt, Germany     Read more

    And why it’s a growing threat to religious liberty and to freedom generally:   http://mosaicmagazine.com/response/2015/08/the-long-rise-of-the-secular-faith/   Posted from Erfurt, Germany     Read more

    The University of Erfurt, which has about 5500 students today, was founded in the fourteenth century. But it was refounded only in the late twentieth century, and so its campus is quite unromantically modern-functional.   The conference is almost entirely located on the university campus.   We began the day by listening to a keynote lecture on “The Biographical Trajectories of Political Islam,” by Abdulkader Tayob of the University of Cape Town.   Then we watched a film... Read more

    “The more we have the less we own.”   “To be full of things is to be empty of God. To be empty of things is to be full of God.” Meister Eckhart   The inscription on the door above, dedicated to a native son of the region, reads, in English translation, “The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness didn’t comprehend it.  In memoriam Meister Eckhart 1260-1327”: das Licht leuchtet in der Finsternisund die Finsternis hat... Read more

    If only my desk and my office were as neat as the those shown in the illustration chosen to show messiness for this article:   http://www.psmag.com/health-and-behavior/why-the-worker-with-the-messy-desk-gets-the-most-done   Posted from Erfurt, Germany   Read more