Huston Smith, the man who helped the world understand other faiths, perhaps more than almost anyone else, died on Dec. 30 at age 97.
I first learned of it when my oldest sister, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., not far from Huston and Kendra Smith, sent me a note saying he had breathed his last about 7:30, the morning of Dec. 1, at his Berkeley home.
I was surprised that it took until Jan. 1 for a news story to show up about the death of this remarkable religion scholar.
Uzhunnalil claims that his captors have made repeated attempts to negotiate with the Indian government and Catholic officials, but he says nothing has happened. “I am very sad that nothing has been done seriously in my regard.
“If I were a European priest, I would have been taken more seriously by authorities, and people and would have got me released,” Uzhunnalil continued. “I am from India and perhaps am not considered of as much value. I am sad about this.”
All was apparently going fine until Micha Brumlik, a retired Frankfurt University education professor and respected Jewish commentator, wrote last June that the popular toy was “anti-Jewish, if not even anti-Semitic.”
The problem, he said, was the inscription on the open pages of the Bible that the Playmobil Luther holds. On the left is written in German: “Books of the Old Testament. END,” while the right page says “The New Testament, translated by Doctor Martin Luther.”
My 5-year-old son sent a letter to Donald Trump a few months ago in which he referred to him as a bully, because he watches the way this man speaks of and to others. If my 5-year-old can catch the palpable tension in the United States today, we must have a lot of questions to ask of our nation’s values. I am not a political scientist, nor do I pretend to be, but I love culture and the way people come together to create the historical rituals of a nation, and it’s important to notice how those rituals carry on generation after generation.
Cornell Brooks, President of the NAACP, and other NAACP Alabama colleagues are occupying Sen. Jeff Sessions’ office until he withdraws as attorney general nominee or they’re arrested, going live on social media from Sessions' Mobile, Alabama office.
The United States Congress is about as Christian today as it was in the early 1960s, according to a new analysis by Pew Research Center.
Nearly 91 percent of members of the 115th Congress convening on Jan. 3 describe themselves as Christian, compared to 95 percent of Congress members serving from 1961 to 1962, according to congressional data compiled by CQ Roll Call and analyzed by Pew.
White, an early and enthusiastic Trump backer, organized national gatherings of evangelical leaders on his behalf, and spoke at a Trump rally on the campus of the University of Central Florida. She also delivered the benediction on the first night of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
White will be only the second woman to pray at an inauguration. And, together with Bishop Wayne T. Jackson of Great Faith Ministries International, who will deliver another of the inaugural benedictions, she will be among the few outspoken advocates of the “prosperity gospel” to appear at an inaugural in recent memory.
It was a year of social service program shutdowns driven by the governor’s office in Springfield. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s description of a triplet of giant evils, each insoluble in isolation from the others, helps us identify an answer to the Tribune’s question. King spoke of the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism. Training for, and the diversion of money to, wars overseas was a crisis inextricable from the race crisis at home, as were policies promoting radical wealth inequality. Rep. Danny Davis of Chicago, whose grandson was killed by gun violence in 2016, insists that “poverty was fueling the city’s bloodshed, and that Chicago needed to make investments ‘to revamp whole communities.’
We live in an oppressive age where there are few potential breaks from the enormous demands of surviving in our rapid-paced global economy. As the demand for more products delivered at a quicker, more insatiable pace becomes normalized, workers are more susceptible to oppression, animals are more easily abused, the land is mistreated, and leisure time rarely goes towards self-nourishment or reflection. All these factors lend themselves to an unhealthy workforce and, looking more broadly, a sick society. This is where the Sabbath comes in. The Sabbath acts as the great adjuster of temporal and intangible time.
At an evacuation hosted by the United Church of Christ in the Philippines, I met the “suffering but struggling Jesus” when I spoke with Bai Bibyaon, the only female chieftan of the Lumad. Bai is over 90 years old, and, like Christ fleeing angry crowds and the surveillance of the Roman Empire, Bai has fled her ancestral land from the violence of the Armed Forces of the Philippines, all to be in sanctuary with her people, the Manobo. She told me, “Our ancestral land, on the Pantaron Mountain, is the only remaining virgin forest in Mindanao. All we want is peace, and to be in our ancestral lands without the Armed Forces of the Philippines or mining companies destroying our land."