According to the Abrahamic traditions, including Judaism, Christianity, Islam and the Baha’i Faith, the universe itself was spoken into being. This offers a fitting metaphor for the promise of interreligious dialogue, the promise of a new creation. Like the speaking into being of the universe, for interreligious dialogue to fulfill this promise requires attention to detail. We must be attentive not only to what we are dialoguing about but who is engaged in the dialogue. In my experience, interreligious dialogue... Read more

By Earle FisherRhetoric Race and Religion Contributor The news surrounding our President’s “endorsement” of same-sex marriage has, in a matter of minutes, gone viral. Twitter feeds, Facebook posts and numerous newspaper and magazine articles are already seizing the moment attempting to express views of support and backlash on behalf of countless communities all around the country. I’ve already read and seen responses that range from people being totally elated, to Meghan McCain’s tweet “…Even though he did it a little... Read more

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Reading the lives of the saints often raises our expectations. We read of someone transfigured with light, or of someone who is present in two places at once. We read beautiful descriptions of the inner life, of an awareness of our union with God or clarity with regard to the nature of all things. In comparison, our own religious experience will be sterile, a voice crying out in the wilderness met with stony silence. For some, such comparisons can lead... Read more

The Rhetoric Race and Religion book club will convene on June 4, 2012 at 6:00pm at the Caritas Village located at 2509 Harvard in Memphis, Tennessee. For those not able to make it in person, we will conduct a live tweet chat starting at 7:15pm (CST) using #R3bookclub #sistercitizen. After the first Mondays of the month, we continue the discussion on twitter every Monday in the month at 7:15pm (CST). Donna Brazile notes that “Sister Citizen carefully documents the complex challenges and hurdles... Read more

http://www-tc.pbs.org/s3/pbs.videoportal-prod.cdn/media/swf/PBSPlayer.swf Watch African-American Spirituals on PBS. See more from Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. Read more

Over the past few decades there has been an increasingly large literature on styles of thinking and cognitive biases (to which I am grateful to Jocelyn Stoller, a reader of this blog, for introducing me) in psychology, culminating in the marvellous book, which I recommend to everyone, by Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow. If you want to understand about how we think, this is the best book for it. Kahneman, in conjunction with his late colleague Amos Tversky, identified... Read more

by Samuel BurkeCNN Israeli feminist Anat Hoffman has just finished a tour in the U.S., campaigning for support over her arrest in the ongoing struggle between secular and Orthodox Jews in Israel. Hoffman is the Executive Director of the Israel Religious Action Center and was arrested at the Western Wall in Jerusalem in 2010 for carrying a Torah at the holy site in Jerusalem. She told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, “I was conducting a religious act that offends the feelings of... Read more

Since it opened its doors in the fall of 2010, the Danforth Center on Religion & Politics at Washington University has been quietly focused on the public nature of its mission — with a limited reach. Before this week, the face of the center, which was launched with a $30 million gift from the Danforth Foundation, was shown to the public largely through its campus events, all for a St. Louis audience. Most of those have been lectures by scholars... Read more