Summary Update on Gordon College (from Richard Ostling) — Gordon College’s trustees will consider this spring whether to scrap a rule that “sexual relations outside marriage, and homosexual practice will not be tolerated” among students and staff, whether on or off campus. The New England Association of Schools and Colleges has directed the college to […]
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Harvill Secker, 2014) — “We control the world because we are the only animals that can cooperate flexibly in very large numbers. If you examine any large-scale human cooperation, you will always find that it is based on some fiction like the nation, like money, like human rights. […]
InterVarsity Case Invokes Hosanna-Tabor Ministerial Exception
InterVarsity Case Invokes Hosanna-Tabor Ministerial Exception — The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, maintaining a broad constitutional right for ministries to control their hiring and firing practices. This is one of the first major rulings under the precedent set by the Supreme Court’s 2012 determination in Hosanna Tabor.
Canadian Supreme Court Allows Assisted Suicide
Canadian Supreme Court Allows Assisted Suicide — The court has ruled that adults in grievous, unending pain have a right to end their life with a doctor’s help. “We do not agree that the existential formulation of the right to life requires an absolute prohibition on assistance in dying,” and rejected the concept of “a […]
Breakaway Episcopal Diocese Wins Court Case to Secede
Breakaway Episcopal Diocese Wins Court Case to Secede — A South Carolina Circuit Court judge ruled that the Diocese of South Carolina legally seceded from the Episcopal Church national body, and can retain control of $500 million in church property and assets.
Christian Health Care Ministries
Christian Health Care Ministries — This NYT piece is another article on alternate health care strategies that Christians and other communities are developing: “Christian Healthcare Ministries is not an insurance company. It is a nonprofit health care sharing ministry. The cost of membership is far lower than the rates of traditional insurance policies — $45 […]
Anti-Christian Bias Among the Intellectual Elite?
Anti-Christian Bias Among the Intellectual Elite? — A small, but elite group of Americans demonstrate signs of anti-Christian hostility, sociologists David Williamson and George Yancey at University of North Texas claim in their new book, So Many Christians, So Few Lions: Is There Christianophobia in the United States? (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014). Here is a […]
Beyond Pacifist and Just War Theology
Beyond Pacifist and Just War Theology — Ron Sider writes that the old debate between pacifists and Just War theorists need not be settled for both to join together in a massive, sustained testing of the possibilities of nonviolence. The theological/ethical commitments of both views demand that they invest seriously in sustained nonviolent peacemaking and, […]
What is the Future of “I”?
What is the Future of “I”? — From Kenneth Hayworth, Senior Research Scientist with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, comes this 9 min. video on consciousness, identity, ethics, and being human. It may serve as a good example of current ideas in evolutionary psychology and can provoke much discussion for courses in neuroscience, religion and […]
Post-Empirical Science as Religion
Post-Empirical Science as Religion — “This year, debates in physics circles took a worrying turn. Faced with difficulties in applying fundamental theories to the observed Universe, some researchers called for a change in how theoretical physics is done. They began to argue — explicitly — that if a theory is sufficiently elegant and explanatory, it […]
