January 20, 2013 1 Comment
Via BibleX:
JSTOR’s archives of more than 1,200 journals is now open for limited free access. Anyone can sign up for a JSTOR account and read up to three articles for free every two weeks. This could be a helpful resource for last minute research or for those who lack easy access to major libraries. You can read more about it here or register with JSTOR here.
January 8, 2013 Leave a comment
India and the world were shocked and appalled by the vicious gang rape and subsequent death of an Indian medical student. Some are now asking whether the rape crisis that has so enraged India is partly the consequence of sex selection abortion. From a Time essay by Erika Christakis:
Growing evidence suggests that in countries like India and China, where the ratio of men to women is unnaturally high due to the selective abortion of female fetuses and neglect of girl children, the rates of violence towards women increase. “The sex ratio imbalance directly leads to more sex trafficking and bride buying,” says Mara Hvistendahl, author of Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men. A scarce resource is generally considered precious, but the lack of women also leaves many young men without marriage partners. In 2011, the number of cases of women raped rose by 9.2 percent; kidnapping and abductions of women were up 19.4 percent. “At this point, we’re talking correlation, not causation. More studies need to be done….[But] it is clear from historical cases and from studies looking at testosterone levels that a large proportion of unmarried men in the population is not a good thing,” says Hvistendahl.
No, it’s not. But sex selection abortion is not a good thing on its face, regardless of harmful correlations or consequences.
December 24, 2012 2 Comments
Sad news, and certainly something to pray about this Christmas eve.
Christianity faces being wiped out of the “biblical heartlands” in the Middle East because of mounting persecution of worshippers, according to a new report.
In the Telegraph:
The study warns that Christians suffer greater hostility across the world than any other religious group.
And it claims politicians have been “blind” to the extent of violence faced by Christians in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
The most common threat to Christians abroad is militant Islam, it says, claiming that oppression in Muslim countries is often ignored because of a fear that criticism will be seen as “racism”.
It warns that converts from Islam face being killed in Saudi Arabia, Mauritania and Iran and risk severe legal penalties in other countries across the Middle East.
The report, by the think tank Civitas, says: “It is generally accepted that many faith-based groups face discrimination or persecution to some degree.
“A far less widely grasped fact is that Christians are targeted more than any other body of believers.”
It cites estimates that 200 million Christians, or 10 per cent of Christians worldwide, are “socially disadvantaged, harassed or actively oppressed for their beliefs.”
“Exposing and combating the problem ought in my view to be political priorities across large areas of the world. That this is not the case tells us much about a questionable hierarchy of victimhood,” says the author, Rupert Shortt, a journalist and visiting fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford.
He adds: “The blind spot displayed by governments and other influential players is causing them to squander a broader opportunity. Religious freedom is the canary in the mine for human rights generally.”
The report, entitled Christianophobia, highlights a fear among oppressive regimes that Christianity is a “Western creed” which can be used to undermine them.
State hostility towards Christianity is particularly rife in China, where more Christians are imprisoned than in any other country in the world, according to the report.
It quotes Ma Hucheng, an advisor to the Chinese government, who claimed in an article last year that the US has backed the growth of the Protestant Church in China as a vehicle for political dissidence.
“Western powers, with America at their head, deliberately export Christianity to China and carry out all kinds of illegal evangelistic activities,” he wrote in the China Social Sciences Press.
“Their basic aim is to use Christianity to change the character of the regime…in China and overturn it,” he added.
The “lion’s share” of persecution faced by Christians arises in countries where Islam is the dominant faith, the report says, quoting estimates that between a half and two-thirds of Christians in the Middle East have left the region or been killed in the past century.
“There is now a serious risk that Christianity will disappear from its biblical heartlands,” it claims.
The report shows that “Muslim-majority” states make up 12 of the 20 countries judged to be “unfree” on the grounds of religious tolerance by Freedom House, the human rights think tank.
It catalogues hundreds of attacks on Christians by religious fanatics over recent years, focusing on seven countries: Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, Nigeria, India, Burma and China.
It claims George Bush’s use of the word “crusade” after the September 11 attacks on New York created the impression for Muslims in the Middle East of a “Christian assault on the Muslim world”.
“But however the motivation for violence is measured, the early twenty-first century has seen a steady rise in the strife endured by Christians,” the report says.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq left Iraqi Christians “more vulnerable than ever”, highlighted by the 2006 beheading of a kidnapped Orthodox priest, Fr Boulos Iskander, and the kidnapping of 17 further priests and two bishops between 2006 and 2010.
“In most cases, those responsible declared that they wanted all Christians to be expelled from the country,” the report says.
In Pakistan, the murder last year of Shahbaz Bhatti, the country’s Catholic minister for minorities, “vividly reflected” religious intolerance in Pakistan.
Shortly after his death it emerged that Mr Bhatti had recorded a video in which he declared: “I am living for my community and for suffering people and I will die to defend their rights.
“I prefer to die for my principles and for the justice of my community rather than to compromise. I want to share that I believe in Jesus Christ, who has given his own life for us.”
The report also warns that Christians in India have faced years of violence from Hindu extremists. In 2010 scores of attacks on Christians and church property were carried out in Karnataka, a state in south west India.
And while many people are aware of the oppression faced in Burma by Aung San Suu Kyi and other pro-democracy activists, targeted abuse of Christians in the country has been given little exposure, the report says.
In some areas of Burma the government has clamped down on Christian protesters by restricting the building of new churches.
“Openly professing Christians employed in government service find it virtually impossible to get promotion,” it adds.
Again,
Christians suffer greater hostility across the world than any other religious group…
December 23, 2012 1 Comment
KIBBUTZ KETURA, ISRAEL – Seven years after I revealed her success in sprouting a 2,000 year-old date palm seed found on Masada, botanist Dr Elaine Solowey of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies has done it again.
1,500 years after the last frankincense tree disappeared from the Holy Land, Dr Solowey has managed to grow the first shoots of a tree whose scented white sap was once worth more than gold.
At Kibbutz Ketura deep in Israel’s Negev Desert, Dr Solowey is carefully nurturing the fragile sapling in her greenhouse, where she is also growing myrrh and balm of Gilead – probably the “gold” brought by the Three Wise Men to the infant Jesus in Bethlehem.
“This is the first frankincense tree to set seed in Israel in 1500 years,” Dr Solowey told me as she presented the tiny sapling for its first public photo-call this week. “It was necessary to bring this variety back to the country because the last people growing these trees near the Dead Sea left and the trees left with them.”
Read on here.
December 18, 2012 1 Comment
In the New York Times today:
A global study of religious adherence released on Tuesday by the Pew Research Center found that about one of every six people worldwide has no religious affiliation. This makes the “unaffiliated,” as the study calls them, the third-largest group worldwide, with 16 percent of the global population — about equal to Catholics.
The study also found a wide disparity in the median age of religious populations, with Muslims and Hindus the youngest, and Buddhists and Jews the oldest. The median age of the youngest group, Muslims, was 23, while the median for Jews was 36.
Over all, Christians (including Catholics) are the largest religious group, with 2.2 billion people, about 32 percent of the world’s population. They are followed by Muslims, with 1.6 billion, about 23 percent. There are about one billion Hindus, about 15 percent of the global population, and nearly half a billion Buddhists, about 7 percent.
The study, “The Global Religious Landscape,” is a snapshot of the size and distribution of religious groups as of 2010, and does not show trends over time.
“Something that may surprise a lot of people,” said Conrad Hackett, a primary researcher on the report, “is that the third-largest religious group, after Christians and Muslims, is the religiously unaffiliated. There may have been some guesses floating out there before, but this is the first time there are numbers based on survey data analyzed in a rigorous and scientific way.”
Read on here.
December 17, 2012 2 Comments
In the Montreal Gazette:
Jerusalem — If hockey is Canada’s national sport, archeology is Israel’s. Wherever one walks, one treads on history; wherever one drives, one travels through history. Whenever one talks — well, consider for example a recent phone call I made to my daughter arranging to pick her up: “I’ll take the Valley of the Cross (the reference is obvious), go up Gaza St. (the ancient route from Jerusalem to the coast) and meet you just outside the Western Wall (the only remainder of Jerusalem’s Holy Temple).” If I go hiking near our house, which directly faces the Judean Hills (where John the Baptist hid out in his day), each of my footsteps crunches on pottery shards strewn about rocky terraces built more than 2,000 years ago by the Children of Israel (my forefathers).
When I learned a few years ago that the famous archeologist Ehud Netzer was leading a tour of Herodium, the site where he had located the grave of Herod the Great, I jumped at the chance. The outing was sponsored by a jewel of an institution, the Bible Lands Museum (sponsored in large part by Canadian philanthropy and itself worth a visit, either in person or via its website, blmj.org).
Herod the Great — as opposed to other Herods less grand — was a sort of Jewish king who ruled Palestine under the umbrella of the Roman Empire from 37 BCE until his gruesome death (more on that later) in 4 CE. Among other things, he was known for grandiose and extensive building; he made his kingdom a place of wonder for, and even tourism from, the reaches of the Roman Empire. In addition to Herodium, Herod erected magnificent buildings in Caesarea and Masada, among others, and was responsible for renovating and refurbishing the great temple in Jerusalem.
Herodium, a few kilometres southwest of Jerusalem, was one of the king’s grandest building projects, serving as summer palace, monument and district administrative capital. As our guide explained, “Think of Herodium’s relationship to Jerusalem as Versailles’s to Paris.” As evidence of how important it was to Herod, this complex was the only one of his many impressive sites that he named after himself.
Above all, this was Herod’s self-chosen place of burial. Why there? As Prof. Netzer recounted, at one point Herod, his family and his armed retainers had to escape Jerusalem during a brief siege of the city by the Parthians, the Roman enemy of the month. During this tactical retreat, Herod’s mother was almost killed when her carriage crashed. But she survived, and Herod vowed he would make the spot his place of burial. And so he did.
For the past 100 years, archeologists have worked at Herodium, but no one had located Herod’s grave until just a few years ago, when Netzer, a trained architect, experienced archeologist and professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, announced that he had discovered the mausoleum halfway up the slope of the cone-shaped site. Why are most archeologists so certain that this was indeed the site of the tomb and that Herod was actually buried there? Well, one can read all about it from the pen of Flavius Josephus, a contemporary historian.
The grand mausoleum is still being excavated and is not yet open to the public — unless you happen to be accompanied by the archeologist who discovered it. (Sadly, in 2010, a few months after our tour, Netzer died as a result of a fall suffered at his beloved site.) As I took in the place, I couldn’t help but wonder what illness Herod died from. In the case of most ancient personages, we haven’t got a clue. But here, once again, Josephus steps into the breach. Quoting more contemporary sources (Herod had died several decades before Josephus wrote his own account), he describes the king’s symptoms:
“He had a fever, though not a raging fever, an intolerable itching of the whole skin, continuous pains in the intestines, tumours of the feet as in dropsy, inflammation of the abdomen and gangrene of the privy parts.” He also suffered, according to Josephus, from “limb convulsions, asthma and foul breath.”
The doctors of the day were, not surprisingly, flummoxed by this combination of symptoms. They used the contemporary therapeutic armamentarium, including immersing the patient in a bath of hot oil. But Herod received no relief, and the bath burned his eyes.
The clinically curious of today can turn to the more modern Historical Clinicopathological Conference put on by the University of Maryland, which brings experts together periodically to examine the death of a famous personage, and which recently tackled Herod’s case. The combination of symptoms was a challenging one, especially the presence of gangrene of the genitalia — something one does not see every day. The scientists used a clever bit of clinical reasoning and came to a tentative conclusion: chronic kidney failure of unknown cause complicated by the rare (thank God) Fournier’s gangrene of the testicles. There are other candidates, of course, such as syphilis or other sexually transmitted diseases, but the kidney diagnosis seemed to fit the symptoms best.
Unfortunately for us and for medical history, Prof. Netzer found no human remains in the mausoleum, probably because it had been ransacked by Jewish rebels during the revolt against the Romans about 70 years after Herod died. So we’ll never know the true cause of his death — but the speculation is fascinating.
December 12, 2012 1 Comment
Cambridge University Library is to release digital versions of some of the most significant religious manuscripts in the world – following on from last year’s release of Isaac Newton’s manuscripts and notebooks.
Launched in December last year (2011), the Cambridge Digital Library has already attracted tens of millions of hits on its website. Among the 25,000 new images being made freely available at http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/ are a 2,000-year old copy of The Ten Commandments (the famous Nash Papyrus) and one of the most remarkable ancient copies of the New Testament (Codex Bezae).
While the latest release focuses on faith traditions – including important texts from Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism – many of the manuscripts being made available are also of great political, cultural and historical importance…
Rest here.
December 11, 2012 Leave a comment
Via the Cardinal Newman Society:
A new study from the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature found that there are fewer jobs being posted for college professors in theology and religious studies than there were prior to the economy tanking in 2008. The number of postings in 2009 was down 46 percent from the previous year across American higher education. In addition, the data show that fewer of the positions that are being offered are tenure track. In 2008, 82 percent of the positions offered were tenure track, but that number dropped to 51 percent in 2009 and 61 percent in 2010.
The study does not speculate on the reasons for the declines, but they most likely have to do with the recession that began in 2008. Other reasons could include less emphasis on religion relative to other subject areas, or lower student enrollment in religion courses.
December 11, 2012 Leave a comment
This from BRIN based on research by Sara Batts who can be found on Twitter here:
Two-thirds of local churches across a range of denominations had a dedicated website as at December 2011, up from two-fifths in 2009, but many of those examined in detail by a postgraduate researcher were found to be sub-optimal. In particular, 63% were non-current in terms of their content, with 12% of them more than three months out of date. Many also had surprising omissions of content, 5% even failing to give the times of the Sunday services and 22% not including a map. Only a minority of church websites contained information about the arrangements for rites of passage: 35% about weddings, 30% about baptisms, and 14% about funerals. Just 8% of websites incorporated a blog and 16% a link to a social media service for the church.
Source: Sara Batts, ‘What’s the Point of a Website …’, Church Times, 30 November 2012, p. 35. The author is undertaking doctoral research at Loughborough University. An earlier report of her research has appeared on BRIN at:
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