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Religion and Public Life With Mark Silk

While I’ve been on break, I’ve had a chance to read Robby George’s latest brief against same-sex marriage, this one written with a couple of younger colleagues in the current issue of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy. It’s a notably Platonic exercise. The authors believe that there is a Platonic form of…

UConn women’s basketball streak is done. Trinity men’s squash streak continues. I’m headed north to Acadia for a little rest and recreation. And a little holiday from blogging. A Happy New Year to you all!

Over the years, Gallup has asked Americans whether they “think religion as a whole is increasing its influence on American life or losing its influence.” And unlike other Gallup survey questions having to do with belief in God and worship attendance, the results have varied a good deal. Right now, we’re at one of those…

A short graphical history, courtesy Culturomics.

Not so much, according to Culturomics:

In American English, that is, in the World according to Culturomics. Note that Judaism and Islam cross in 1999. And that references to Islam bulk larger now than references to Christianity did in 1980. No surprise that, in the publishing mind of America, concern with Islam has nearly tripled since the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

Responding to my post on military chaplains post-DADT, commenter Sandra Brown writes: First of all you are missing one thing, the clergy takes an oath before God to uphold God’s message. Religiously speaking this is suppose to be their first commitment. A clergy member is sworn to this or their own salvation is void!  It…

So now we have the official word from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: Condoms are a lesser evil, when used by prostitutes infected with HIV. Ultra theologians who have claimed the the use of condoms in such circumstances only add crime to crime…are wrong. Pope Benedict meant what he said. Naturally, some…

GetReligion Commandante Mattingly and I have have been having a bit of a back-and-forth about chaplains in the military post-DADT over on Cathy Grossman’s Facebook page, and I thought the issue worth venting a bit more publicly. (Here’s his official review of the coverage.) TMatt’s view seems to be that it’s a question of (as…

If you go to the Google Culturomics site and type in “Jesus” in English language publications, you’ll see that after sinking steadily from the middle of the 19th century, usage incidence plateaued between 1940 and 1980, and then began to climb, such that it’s now at the level it was it was in 1900. “God”…
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