If monks in Myanmar weren’t marching against the military junta this week, they would likely be taking part in a march of another kind. Late September is traditionally the time for one of Myanmar’s largest religious festivals, held just 100 miles north of Yangon, epicenter of the protests and scene of increasingly violent government [...]
Entries from September 2007
September 26, 2007
Reader Mail
“Good evening, I had not thought of the Louvin Brothers in a long time. Not that they had gone anywhere, I had. I started to review their song list and immediately grabbed a pen and started to write the words to “Praying,” “River of Jordan” and “Last Chance to Pray,” etc. You see I used [...]
September 18, 2007
Divinity & Disgust
The question of where morality comes from remains a bee in the bonnet of both religionists and philosophers. Or perhaps it only seems so because we’ve lately been reading a few books on the subject. What emerges from this reading is nagging feeling that talking about the origins of morality is a way of [...]
September 13, 2007
Happy Ethiopian New Year!
Yes, we know that it is also Rosh Hashanah, but we’ve published so much already about the Jewish High Holidays that we thought it was time to blow another new year’s horn. That it happens to Ethiopia’s big day is convenient because it gives us a chance to tip our hat to some [...]
September 12, 2007
Two Types of Other
We’ve just received an email asking us to clarify our religious affiliation by choosing one of the options on this long and peculiar menu:
NO – None
BP – Baptist
BU – Buddhist
CA – Catholic
CG – Congregational
DC – Disciples of Christ
EP – Episcopal
HI – Hindu
IS – Islam
JE – Jewish
LD – Latter-Day Saints
LU – Lutheran
LW – Other
ME – Methodist
MN [...]
September 11, 2007
Locked Up; Thrown Out
Six years ago today, sitting in front of a television with the rest of the country, we jotted down a few thoughts that soon became a reflection on the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. Two wars later, we see some of the strange fruit those attacks planted: news of the ongoing purge of religion [...]
September 11, 2007
A Final Wrinkle
KtB’s own Laurel Snyder has a lovely remembrance of Madeleine L’Engle at Salon. “Nothing was enough for L’Engle,” Laurel writes. “As an author, she danced with demanding philosophical questions and toyed with quantum physics. She wrote about faith with devotion, dabbled in ethics, psychology, myth, art, politics and nature…” She did it all for an [...]
September 10, 2007
Death & Virtue; Billy & Woody
We here at KtB had an interesting weekend, quite by accident spending some time with a couple of unexpectedly complementary classics: After Virtue and Love and Death. The former, Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of contemporary ethical theory, we had not read before and even now would have preferred to avoid. The latter, Woody Allen’s great take-off [...]
September 7, 2007
Heady Days
There’s nothing particularly religious about the recent record-breaking sale of a jewel-encrusted platinum skull by the British artist Damien Hirst. Yes, its $100 million price tag may be religious in the “Holy Shit!” sense, but beyond that it just seems silly that so much could be made of a glorified paperweight:
Certainly there is something beautiful [...]
