Archive | July, 2012
One Parent-Five

What makes one a parent? Biology or intent?

In a cartoon, a kindly woman and a young child are standing in front of six people.  The woman is telling the child, “This is your intended mother, this is your intended father, this is your egg donor, this

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mothers

Outsourcing pregnancy…

Money is obviously the common denominator in the surrogacy industry.  And it is an industry, a global industry that connects the wealthy who have money with the poor who are willing to rent their wombs as a source of …

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nocreed

The need for creed…

 

“[T]he need for creed will have its way, even if the creed is to have no creed,” writes Curtis Freeman.

To make his point, he tells of a boy who was riding with a Catholic priest.

A sign in …

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pascal

Teaching our children to be alone…

‘All man’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.’  ~  Blaise Pascal

Several comments in the article quoted in the previous post remind of Pascal’s famous quote about the miseries of not being …

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0418_couple-texting_sm

I share, therefore I am…

Texting, e-mail and posting promote a “flight from conversation.”

“We’re always communicating,” yet “we’ve sacrificed conversation for mere connection.”

These observations come from Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and M.I.T professor, who has spent the past 15 years studying the technologies …

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Flannery O'Connor

Worth considering…

Push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you. What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.

~ Flannery O’Connor

The

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Juvenilization

The Juvenilization of American Christianity…

American Christianity refuses to grow up.  “We’re all adolescents now!”

Beginning in the 1930s and ‘40s, a quiet revolution began in American churches.  It occurred in all segments of Christianity, but it has been most notably “successful” in the evangelical …

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Souls in Transition

Soul Searching, five years on…

Even though Soul Searching was published in 2005, there is little reason to think that things have improved in the spiritual lives of American teens.  In fact, in a follow-up study, Souls in Transition:  The Religious and Spiritual Lives of

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Soul Searching

A return of pagan Christianity?

All things old are new again. Or, so it would seem!

As I recently reread Peter Gay’s chapter on “The Era of Pagan Christianity,” I was reminded of a more recent book that reflects a similar sort of syncretism, …

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Enlightenment-Gay

The era of pagan Christianity…

How are the Middle Ages like the decades before and after the turn of the 21st century? Both are characterized by religious syncretism—the blending of different philosophical and religious beliefs and practices.

Historian Peter Gay describes the four centuries …

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