April 2010
40 posts
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March 2010
37 posts
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Longing for Passovers and Memories Missed: Pesach...
by Mary Moos, guest contributor
At Monday night’s Passover Seder we used hard-covered, bound copies of a Haggadah with a copyright date of 1923. The first user of the book — a relative or friend of our host family — had carefully inscribed his name on the inside cover.
In the many years since my conversion from Roman Catholicism to Judaism, I’ve used a variety of Haggadot but none...
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"Pentecostal Scholars Call for Academic Freedom" →
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
The ELCA’s (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) vote lifting its ban on openly gay and lesbian clergy, has garnered quite a bit of media attention during the past year. While we here at SOF dive into a project culling out the many personal perspectives on this complex issue, homosexuality and its place within civic and religious life is serving as an...
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“The silence of the Vatican is contempt. Its failure to fully examine its central...”
– —Martin Kimani, from his scathing critique of the Catholic Church in today’s Cif section of The Guardian titled “For Rwandans, the Pope’s Apology Must Be Unbearable.”
Trent Gilliss, online editor
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Science That Liberates Us from Reductive Analyses
Krista Tippett, host
We originally produced “Getting Revenge and Forgiveness” in the bitter midst of the 2008 election season. And when we first decided on the current program schedule just weeks ago, we had no idea that this show would land in another dramatic moment of recriminatory public emotion, over health care and other issues, in an already charged political climate.
Now, as...
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"Super Size Me: How the Last Supper Became a... →
by Trent Gilliss, online editor
The science editor of The Independent reports on a scientific study finding that “the artistic renditions of the Last Supper over the past thousand years show that the size of the plates and the amount of food being eaten by Jesus Christ and his disciples have grown significantly over the centuries.”
Oh, the Cornell University group found that in the...
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Honoring Passover and Evolving Tradition Shubha...
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Romero Inspires "An Unlikely Range of People"
Colleen Scheck, senior producer
“Let no one be offended because we use the divine words read at our mass to shed light on the social, political and economic situation of our people.”
These are the opening lines of the last sermon given by Archbishop Oscar Romero before his assassination 30 years ago today. This past weekend over 10,000 Catholics participated in a commemorative...
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"Sikh Army Captain Graduates" →
Shubha Bala, associate producer
For the first time since 1984, a Sikh has graduated as an officer in the U.S. Army. Sikhs believe that “the unshorn hair wrapped in a turban and beard are required to keep adherents in the natural state in which God made them.” Captain Tejdeep Singh Rattan received an exception that allows him to keep his turban and beard, the first time such an...
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“Going against your core values and losing sight of them. I quit meditating. I...”
– —Professional golfer Tiger Woods offered this response to Kelly Tilghman’s first question about his loss of being in control.
One of yesterday’s two big interviews in which Woods answered questions for the first time since his November 27, 2009 crash, he also was asked about the...
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Mapping Religion in Online Realms (or Maps of...
Trent Gilliss, online editor
Over at Floatingsheep, Mark Graham has been rendering some superb data sets about religion as it manifests itself in various ways on the Internet. There’s some good learning to be had but they are also a lot of fun so I’m taking it a bit further by pulling maps from two discrete entries and pairing them for a bit of play.
First, my sub-dollar 2-liter...
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A Senator's "Conscience Picture"
Trent Gilliss, online editor
NYT’s Lens blog posted a fun entry about Senator Patrick Leahy’s personal photography as he operates from a unique vantage point within the hallowed halls and meeting rooms of Washington D.C. As interesting as the many photos of presidents and legislators are, it’s this “conscience picture” — a portrait he took of an El Salvadoran man in...
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If Jesus Wore a T-shirt
David Black, guest contributor
I almost never buy T-shirts. When my son Josh was younger and going through that gotta-have-that-shirt stage, he bought enough for a regiment: sports shirts, camp shirts, school shirts, fund-raiser shirts — whatever was on the market. And when he began to outgrow the T-shirt phase, I inherited more hand-me-downs than a man could use. I kept only enough to handle...
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"His Next Act: Driving Out Apartheid’s Ghost" →
Shubha Bala, associate producer
Krista’s recent interview with Desmond Tutu (listen for it at the end of April) has us all contemplative about the current state of South Africa. The New York Times recently published this article about renowned playwright Athol Fugard:
“The hope is that the Fugard and its resident acting ensemble will attract people of all races to mingle on its...
