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Somehow I missed the odd reference to some guy named “Bill Graham” in The New York Times article on Obama’s desire to expand the role of religious groups in combating the nation’s social problems. Thankfully, the blog Between Two Worlds picked up the reference:
A funny thing happened last week after I dashed off a quick post about that omnipresent “eternal life” item in the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey produced by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
In his famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell criticized modern writers for all manners of sins, not the least of which were a lack of detail and specificity. He cited a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes: “I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong …” Then he translated it in modern English: “Objective consideration of temporary phenomena compels the conclusion …”
To the surprise of few, presumed 2008 Democratic Presidential Nominee Barack Obama announced that he plans to out-do Bush in integrating faith-based programs on the federal level. What surprised some, at least initially, was an inaccurate report from the Associated Press that said that Obama’s plan would support religious organizations’ ability to hire and fire based on faith.
Most conversations about globalization focus on economic issues and, clearly, that engine of modernization turns many other cultural wheels. But anyone who has studied mass media knows that images from other cultures — especially advertisements and entertainment images — have a profound impact on their own. A professor of mine once said that that two main messages carried by most ads are (1) you do not own this and (2) you do not look like this.
The growth of Christianity in non-Western cultures and societies is widely acknowledged to be one of the biggest religion stories these days. A significant subset of that story is the rapid growth of Christianity in China to a point where it is the country’s second largest religion (behind only Buddhists and ahead of Islam).
What do you know, I had no idea that Sen. John McCain was in the neighborhood. I didn’t see the security ‘copters buzzing around the mountaintop.
A few days ago, Terry looked at a few of the initial stories that came out of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life megastudy. In the comments, a few of you noted one particularly odd statistic from the survey. Here’s how Ed Stoddard of Reuters put it on the news service’s blog:
Here is the latest news from the still raging culture wars at America’s military academies, as reported by the Baltimore Sun.
