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January 2023

January 24, 2023
The Fifth Dalai Lama, His Holiness Ngawang Lobsang Gyatso (1617–1682), was the first Dalai Lama...
January 21, 2023
In the years before the U.S. Civil War, three major Christian denominations split over slavery....
January 20, 2023
Misunderstanding abounds about the role of Christianity and the abolitionist movement, the 19th century movement...
January 15, 2023
Ikkō-ikki was a name given to peasants' revolts in 15th and 16th century Japan. Most of...
January 11, 2023
The short list of Popes Who Resigned has only three names. These are the late...
January 07, 2023
Pope Joan was a woman disguised as a man who allegedly became Pope John VIII...
January 03, 2023
Newspaper obituaries of the late Pope Emertus Benedict XVI (1927-2022) mention that he was the...

December 2022

December 30, 2022
It is the legendary location of hundreds of martial arts action movies, including Shaolin Temple...
December 28, 2022
Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179; also called Hildegard von Bingen) was a nun, an author, a...
December 23, 2022
Even if you are not into World War I history, you may have heard of...
December 20, 2022
There are several Jewish composers among the greats of classical music -- Copland, Bernstein, Mahler,...
December 17, 2022
This is an appreciation of Jewish cantors. Although I am not Jewish, I am a...
December 16, 2022
Even if you know little else about Buddhism, you've heard of the Dalai Lama. The...
December 10, 2022
How many days did Buddha sit under the Bodhi Tree? The standard answer is forty-nine...
December 07, 2022
You may wonder why the Buddha is so often depicted as chubby and laughing. The...
December 02, 2022
The Gandharan scrolls are ancient scrolls, mostly in fragments, that in recent years have been...

November 2022

November 28, 2022
There are a number of dubious stories about George Frideric Handel's oratorio Messiah. (The formal...
November 23, 2022
I've written a number of columns looking at issues involving religion and the U.S. Constitution....
November 21, 2022
There is no more controversial phrase in U.S. history than Thomas Jefferson's "wall of separation...
November 18, 2022
In the 18th century establishment of religion, or designating an official state religion, was common...
November 16, 2022
Among the U.S. founding fathers, nobody cared more about religious freedom than James Madison.  Madison...
November 12, 2022
In 1956, a student in a public high school near Philadelphia protested his school's daily...
November 10, 2022
It has been sixty years since a U.S. Supreme Court decision ended class recitations of...
November 05, 2022
The 6th to 8th centuries were a golden age for Irish monasteries. The hand copying...
November 02, 2022
Monastic book production in the Middle Ages began in Ireland. This is recorded in the...

October 2022

October 29, 2022
This is a continuation of A Brief History of Christian Nationalism that will look at...
October 27, 2022
Christian nationalism is much in the news these days, at least in the United States....
October 23, 2022
Watch out for presentism in religious history. "Presentism" in history is judging the past by...
October 19, 2022
The last post was on the history of witches and how the European witch was...
October 17, 2022
Let's explore the history of witches, the queens of Hallowe'en. Witches inhabit spaces where religion...
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