International News

Death, burial and religion

Death and burial issues bring up a complex mix of beliefs, faith, rituals, customs and cultural traditions. The Chicago Tribune‘s religion section was able to cover a few of the issues in a rather short story on the growing number of religious traditions specially catered to today in the Chicago area.


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Just another candlestick holder?

As you would expect, I have been following the coverage of the Russian “election” and the rise of Dmitry Medvedev. I have to admit that I have been frustrated by the reports that include snippets about his Orthodox faith and the role that it plays, or does not play, in his life.


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About the bisexual-bishop story (updated)

As you might expect, I would like to make a few comments about “The Bishop’s Daughter,” the buzz-provoking piece in The New Yorker by the poet Honor Moore about the double life lived by her father, the Rt. Rev. Paul Moore Jr., the trailblazing liberal leader of the Diocese of New York from 1972-89.


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Rediscovering or revising Islam?

The BBC published a story last week that should have gotten a great deal more coverage than it has. According to the report, the Turkish government has commissioned a team of scholars to revise the Hadith — the collection of thousands of sayings reputed to have come from the Prophet Muhammad.


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Here's a really good story -- so there

Whenever your GetReligionistas get together — face to face, as opposed to cyberspace — one of the things we bemoan is that our readers — that would be you guys — really don’t seem to respond much whenever we go out of our way to praises stories in the mainstream press.


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Continuing the Useem dialogue

I have been putting off posting the second part of my dialogue (click here for earlier post) with freelance journalist Andrea Useem for two simple reasons: (1) I was out of town for a week, attempting to survive four days of traffic-challenged driving in greater Los Angeles and (2) we normally fill our 5Q+1 interviews with hyperlinks to all of the publications, schools, think tanks, etc., linked to the journalist’s career and, in this case, Useem has just been too busy for me to look up all of those links.


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Part. Of. The. Story. In. Kosovo.

Main Entry: bal-kan-ize …Inflected Form(s): bal-kan-ized; bal-kan-iz-ing … Etymology: Balkan Peninsula … 1: to break up (as a region or group) into smaller and often hostile units


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