Social Science Research Council

At First Things, Joseph Bottum laments the disappearance of Advent:

Christmas has devoured Advent, gobbled it up with the turkey giblets and the goblets of seasonal ale. Every secularized holiday, of course, tends to lose the context it had in the liturgical year. Across the nation, even in many churches, Easter has hopped across Lent, Halloween has frightened away All Saints, and New Year’s has drunk up Epiphany.

Still, the disappearance of Advent seems especially disturbing—for it’s injured even the secular Christmas season: opening a hole, from Thanksgiving on, that can be filled only with fiercer, madder, and wilder attempts to anticipate Christmas.

More Christmas trees. More Christmas lights. More tinsel, more tassels, more glitter, more glee—until the glut of candies and carols, ornaments and trimmings, has left almost nothing for Christmas Day. For much of America, Christmas itself arrives nearly as an afterthought: not the fulfillment, but only the end, of the long Yule season that has burned without stop since the stores began their Christmas sales.

Continue reading his essay here.

Louis A. Ruprecht takes issue with the theology of a Baptist minister who has urged his married congregants to have more sex:

If this sounds almost magical, and too good to be true, then it probably is. Reverend Young gestures to Genesis, oddly enough, as a way to make his case. There is no shame in marital sex, he says; “God thought it up, it was his idea.”

These are theological howlers that simply cannot be allowed to pass. Adam and Eve weren’t married, for starters. And in Eden, there is no clear reference to their sexuality at all. Neither marriage nor marital sex “was God’s idea,” at least not there, in the beginning. In point of fact, God’s ideas had little to do with what transpired in the Garden of Eden. What happened there was a rebellion, and then expulsion from the Paradise-Garden. Shame was actually born there. And “the Woman” did not even receive her name until after the expulsion, when Adam gave her one. The name he gave her—Hava, or “Life-giver”—indicated that now they were going to have sex, and children… in the face of their own incipient and tragic mortality.

[...] To be sure, this is a news story in part because it links two phenomena we do not normally think together: evangelical Christianity, and the embrace of a shame-free sexual life.

But the astonishing and utterly unreflective modernness of some of what Young proposes, coupled with the sheer vacuousness of the theology lying behind his “sexperiment,” should give evangelicals greater pause.

Read his entire post at Religion Dispatches and find the New York Times story on Reverend Young here.

Meenakshi Ravi on the possible political and religious repercussions of the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai:

Today, India’s political parties seem to be using many of the same fault lines used by the British to wrench open India’s multi-cultural society and win votes. It’s clear to many watching that these latest terror attacks in Mumbai will deliver some much needed electoral gains to the BJP in the state elections. The fear amongst liberal Indians (be they pro or anti-Congress) is that come 2009, the BJP will be in position to put together (probably another coalition) government at the centre. That may just be the beginning of a dangerous path towards the de-secularization of a country whose stance on religious tolerance has been one of its most praiseworthy and noble traits.

Read her full commentary at The Huffington Post, where Mohsin Mohi-Ud Din also writes about the implications the attacks might have for Kashmir.

A United Nations measure called “Combating Defamation of Religions,” backed mainly by Muslim-majority countries and opposed by the United States and Western Europe, was passed this week. It paves the way, critics believe, for international legitimation of laws restricting free speech and freedom of religion. It also raises interesting questions about whether religions, as such, possess legal rights, according to Canwest News Service:

Canada and other Western countries emphasize the distinction between granting an “idea” rights - and defending the right of people not to be discriminated against.

“Canada rejects the basic premise that religions have rights; human rights belong to human beings,” said Catherine Loubier, spokeswoman for Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon.

“The focus (here) should not be on protecting religions, but rather on protecting the rights of the adherents of religions, including of people belonging to religious minorities, or people who may choose to change their religion, or not to practice religion at all.”

More at Canada.com.

The American Muslim reports that the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition (MACLC), a New York-based coalition of Muslim advocates, attorneys and community leaders, has released a critique of a New York Police Department report on ”Radicalization in the West: The Home Grown Threat.”

The controversial report, which falsely alludes to the susceptibility of all Muslim males aged 16 to 45 to terrorist ideology, is methodologically weak and more confusing than illuminating. While not intending to profile Islam and Muslims, the report does exactly that.

“Unquestionably, all criminal acts of violence are unacceptable and prevention requires a well-researched report to guide responsible policing,” said Faiza Ali, CAIR-NY Community Affairs Director and co-author of MACLC’s critique. “The study of violent extremism, however, should decouple religion from terror to safeguard civil liberties on free speech and equal protection grounds as a matter of strong public policy.”

Read the full article here and access MACLC’s critique here.

This Thursday, in the face of a recession and a national political transition, we will all break, take a four day weekend, and stare the national obesity epidemic in the eye as we go on a federally mandated turkey binge. But before our first delicious forkful of patriotic gluttony, we will each be asked what we are thankful for. So let us all be thankful for the internet, which brings us this roundup of all things about Thanksgiving and faith.

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Jim Sleeper discusses “why Barack’s victory makes prospects brighter for Christians, Muslims and Jews” at Reset Dialogues on Civilization:

Even as we lurch from symbolism to substance now that Barack Obama is President-elect, I hope that he appreciates the symbolic and substantive rewards of being sworn in on January 20 as “Barack Hussein Obama.” During the campaign, neo-conservatives such as Daniel Pipes and others of Obama’s detractors thought it smart to highlight his paternal Muslim roots and associations. But now that he’s won, anyone would have to be as naive as a neo-con to miss the nobility and world-historical gains this country would achieve if, having overthrown a bad Hussein, it installed a good one—not in Baghdad, but in Washington.

Read the full article here (and as originally published in Talking Points Memo). Also, check out here & there’s roundup on “Voting in a year when “Muslim” was a slur.”

In an interview with Religioscope, Michael Hastings Black discusses how new media can help the image of Islam in the United States:

Religioscope - New media seem to be more dialogic in terms of depicting minorities in the US. At the same time, the global image of the Muslim identity group seems to be quite negative. How would you balance the respective effects of the 9/11 aftermath and the democratization effect of new media?

Michael Hastings Black - What’s most important about new media is the fact that they are a space dialogue and self-depiction. Regardless of what the mass media do with monologue, online is a space in which Muslims can author their own stories, ones that can be consumed by other Muslims and non-Muslims. Here we see an ever-increasing diversity of voices who speak as Muslims, from a strict imam to a spunky lesbian; just as with every other religion, there is a wealth of diversity within. It is this panoply of voices that help to counter negative and simple-minded thinking about Islam.

Read the full interview here.

Monte Bute reviews a new edition of Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History:

Race and gender may have been the most visible currents in the 2008 presidential primaries, but what really unsettled the political waters was a riptide of religion, and perhaps we could call Reinhold Niebuhr Barack Obama’s theologian. Parts of The Irony of American History are time-bound, but Neibuhr does sketch an existential drama that is born of the human condition. He appropriates the ideas of tragedy, pathos, and irony to portray three enduring theories of human nature and destiny. With Abraham Lincoln as his exemplar, the preacher casts his lot with irony.

Read the full review in Contexts.

Michael Bond reviews Donald S. Lopez Jr.’s Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed:

In the troubled relationship between science and religion, Buddhism represents something of a singularity, in which the usual rules do not apply. Sharing quests for the big truths about the Universe and the human condition, science and Buddhism seem strangely compatible. At a fundamental level they are not quite aligned, as both these books make clear. But they can talk to each other without the whiff of intellectual or spiritual insult that haunts scientific engagement with other faiths.

…Lopez, whose book is more a history of the discourse between Buddhism and science than an examination of how the two inform each other, makes much of the Dalai Lama’s doctrinal flexibility. He suggests that this stems partly from the Tibetan leader’s desire to show that his religion is not the primitive superstition that many nineteenth-century European writers—and modern Chinese communists—have described. Perhaps so, but it must also derive from the Buddhist desire to know reality and not hide behind false assumptions about the world or our own nature.

…As a research exercise, the East–West discourse on consciousness sounds harmonious, but at a deep level, it is anything but. Both Luisi and Lopez identify this as an area of great conceptual divergence. Whereas cognitive science’s best guess is that consciousness is an emergent property of neuronal organization, Buddhists see it at some pure subtle level as not contingent on matter at all, but deriving instead from “a previous continuum of consciousness”—the Dalai Lama’s words—that transcends death and has neither beginning nor end. That is hard to test. Furthermore, it seems impossible for anyone to grasp such Buddhist notions of consciousness without experiencing them, because there is no way yet of quantifying them—and that means years of meditation. As Chu says in Mind and Life: “It’s like a physicist explaining electromagnetic waves to someone who doesn’t know mathematics.”

Read Bond’s full review in Nature.