Why did it happen? I think that the combination of four factors (listed below) was close to a sufficient cause. Sufficient at least to make a terrorist attack highly likely . And they are also arguably necessary. I think if you remove any one the first three then Bondi does no...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aupVJkTnIqY This is one of the best podcast interviews we’ve done. We discuss Peter Heather’s marvellous book “Christendom: the triumph of a Religion”. It covers the thousand years from the time Christianity becomes embedded in the Roman Empire,...

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It's here, the booklet I am sure you have all been waiting for. The one which Gigi Foster and Michael Baker slaved over for 10 months . It is also on Kindle . It is dedicated to all the victims of the Panic, in poor countries and rich countries. They include our children, the...

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John sent me the text below in response to reading my essay on John Macmurray . As you may know he trained as a priest and after many decades lost his faith. He is now in his nineties and must have things read to him. I presume he dictates his correspondence. I have enjoyed co...

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I visited Afghanistan only once, on a brief visit in 2014. I fell off a donkey to great hilarity of the local villagers, slept in a compound with the armed owner keeping watch the whole night, heard stories of how life was in Soviet times, and got a glimpse of why the Afghan p...

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I have been a utilitarian for about 30 years now and am seen in my academic work as an extreme version of the genre. I did my Phd on the topic . I do not merely say that governments should make policy for the benefit of the wellbeing of the population, but have spent years in...

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Sometimes one has an idea that blazes into one's consciousness as a solution to one particular concern, which then starts to be something much bigger than just a solution to a problem. It becomes an interesting thing in itself and starts appearing as relevant to many different...

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With a recent publication in Nature that reported lockdowns have no effect on covid-cases or covid-deaths, there are now over 30 studies that fail to find any covid-reducing benefits of lockdowns. Worse, across countries and time, more severe lockdowns are just leading to more...

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There have long been scientists who were celebrities in their own time. Galileo, Keppler, Goodall, Linneus, Cousteau, Darwin, Smith, Leeuwenhoek, Da Vinci, Ibn Khaldhun, Curie, and many others in the last 800 years were followed and admired. They in many ways performed their s...

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Well, well, well. The legal system has bungled its way to releasing a guilty man. Even if George Pell were not guilty of any acts of child molesting (as it was called during most of the time he was doing it) he'd belong in jail for his criminal disregard and wilful hostility t...

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The mass hysteria of the corona crisis is raging, with the resulting self-isolation of whole economies and populations. The loss seems greater with every new forecast on the economic collapse than I initially though t, and the benefit of imprisoning and terrorizing the populat...

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Something very odd happens when people get told a story of how other people with some shared characteristic have behaved in the past: they take it personal and see themselves in those ‘ancestors’, even if they share no actual family relationship to those people and even though...

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Episode 5 of the final season of Game of Thrones showed us a vengeful fallen angle, Daenerys Targaryen, after whom thousands of children in the real world have been named. Even though her enemies had been defeated and surrendered, she nevertheless used her massive weapon, a fi...

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In 1900, the modern nation states of Europe faced many challenges in terms of how they were run, with poverty and disease still prevalent. The largest problems were more or less successfully addressed by 2000. The road involved world wars and civil wars, but the essential reci...

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[note to self] Economics, sociology, anthropology, history, psychology, and the other social sciences are currently taught in an unorganised manner. The undergraduate degree in any of these disciplines consists of about 20 separate courses that each differ markedly from the ot...

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The probability of a massive nuclear war the next 10 years between any of the 8 current nuclear powers (US, UK, France, Russia, India, Pakistan, NK, Israel) seems low. The bluster of the leaders is supposed to make the threat look a bit bigger than it is in order to get negoti...

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The God of monotheism did not die, it only left the scene for a while in order to reappear as humanity – the human species dressed up as a collective agent, pursuing its self-realization in history. But, like the God of monotheism, humanity is a work of the imagination. The on...

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In all ways that we measure these things, physical violence has reduced in Western countries in the last 70 years, particularly mainland Western Europe. What about psychological violence though? Psychological violence, ie the inflicting of mental pain, takes many forms. It inc...

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Humanity is at a high point. What our ancestors dreamed of is slowly becoming a reality: a world without hunger in which the vast majority of mankind live peaceful and long lives. We are not there yet, but in Europe, East Asia, Latin America, and even in Africa (our cradle), m...

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Sometimes, it feels like 1910 all over again. Then, a confident Germany was the up-and-coming industrial power house, fearing an even more up-and-coming Russia, with the UK and France desperately holding on to their colonial empires. Now, a confident China is the up-and-coming...

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The #MeToo flood of stories of women who feel abused by men – ranging from lurid stares to straightforward rape – seems like a disaster to me for the Democrats. Not because of the stories themselves, but because of how the progressive media and commentators have reacted to it....

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Looking at the newspapers you’d think Catholicism is having a hard time with philandering priests and cover-ups of their doings being found out on a weekly basis. In Australia, the royal commission has uncovered a lot of systematically covered-up child abuse in the Catholic Ch...

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Let me indulge, purely for entertainment value, in some fan-speculation on what we will see on-screen after the Long Night is over and the final 6 episodes Of Game of Thrones are run in 2019. Let me first talk about the end-game aspects I think the books and the tv-series seem...

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Minister Dutton says that 2/3 of people recently charged with terrorism in Australia have Lebanese Muslim backgrounds. However, the first rule when considering dramatic statistics should be to think “compared to what”. In this case, where else might we expect Islamic extremist...

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What is the meaning of the relief sculpture above? I recall when I was last on the Athenian Acropolis just over a year ago marvelling at the Parthenon, not just its emphatic and sublime beauty but also its strangeness . It's so big and so magnificent. What the hell did this ci...

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The current inquiry into institutional child abuse holds some interesting lessons about the nature of religion, which I'll stay clear of here. But it also holds a larger lesson about the ability of organisations to act morally and to act properly in the absence of external reg...

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I know I took the notion of optimising to heart as I learned it - implicitly - from my economist Dad. And there are those who might argue that the idea in economics came from the society around economists as the discipline came into being. But now it seems optimising as the he...

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"MIT's Openness to Jewish Economists" , E. Roy Weintraub MIT emerged from “nowhere” in the 1930s to its place as one of the three or four most important sites for economic research by the mid-1950s. A conference held at Duke University in April 2013 examined how this occurred....

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Warning: Enthusiasm Alert. I've just got home from seeing the Crucible by Arthur Miller at the Melbourne Theatre Company. I thought it was a very good production. I thought I wasn't going to like David Wenham much at the outset as he seemed a bit strained. But that's perhaps b...

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As people reading this blog would know, I'm no fan of Richard Dawkins writings on God. However, having seen this video, I have to admit to preferring Dawkins to this guy, whose attack on the four horsemen of militant atheism I broadly agree with. On top of his superior manner,...

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PERSECUTION PERPETUATED: THE MEDIEVAL ORIGINS OF ANTI-SEMITIC VIOLENCE IN NAZI GERMANY* Nico Voigtlander Hans-Joachim Voth How persistent are cultural traits? Using data on anti-Semitism in Germany, we ?nd local continuity over 600 years. Jews were often blamed when the Black...

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http://youtu.be/TxMD02zU9SE Apparently not. In any event, I found this an engaging conversation - even if it's about cult beliefs. I wouldn't have expected it, but I found Mitt Romney arguing for his cult more engaging than most of the rest of Mitt's campaigning. Pity he walke...

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The very sharp Waleed Aly has joined the debate over whether Catholic child abuse justifies a legal requirement for priests to break the confessional seal . Aly's take: it's an argument with almost no practical consequences, because most priests see excommunication as a far wo...

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To my astonishment, Catholic Archbishop of Sydney George Pell spent part of a press conference today claiming that the news media are exaggerating the scandal of Catholic Church child abuse in Australia . There was "a persistent press campaign against the Catholic Church's ade...

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Looking at the newspapers you’d think Catholicism is having a hard time with philandering priests and cover-ups of their doings being found out on a weekly basis. Dutch and German newspapers kept track for a while of the regional frequencies of new cases of sexual misconduct a...

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Samuel Sewall (1652–1730) is the man with the bowed head in this picture. He has much to feel remorseful about. Amongst eight other judges, he's sentenced nineteen innocent people to death for being witches in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. When January 14, was established as a...

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[caption id="attachment_20927" align="alignright" width="300"] Father Frank Flynn (left)[/caption] I was deeply disturbed by Monday's Four Corners program on child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, not because it's any news as such but because very little seems to have changed...

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Here's a picture of the moon and the sun juxtaposed. They cycle between being the same size in our heavens and being a bit bigger or smaller than each other. It's spooky. Just the right size to deliver a total eclipse, or an annular one, depending on how they are feeling at th...

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I'm not much of a fan of giving to wealthy causes. Like private schools for the well healed. I was asked to attend an interview to see if I'd go on the Council of my daughter's private school - which I said I would. I was then asked if I was Jewish (it's an Anglican School) an...

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[caption id="attachment_19320" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Peter Singer"] [/caption] Last week's ABC QandA debate between uber-atheist Richard Dawkins and Catholic archbishop George Pell generated quite a lot of blogosphere debate , not least here at Troppo . Howev...

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No time to read the paper right now, but it looks great. Kantian Optimization, Social Ethos, and Pareto Efficiency Date: 2012-03 By: John E. Roemer (Dept. of Political Science, Yale University) Although evidence accrues in biology, anthropology and experimental economics that...

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Since some episodes are good and others bad, I could never see the point of being either a declared friend or enemy of Q&A. But the bad have so thoroughly outnumbered the good this year that I'm about ready to concede it's not worth watching. It hit rock bottom last night with...

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I couldn't help thinking that the media's obsession with presenting a superficial appearance of ideological balance might have gone a little too far when I discovered that The Age has not only a religion correspondent but an atheism columnist . The latter rather crassly bills...

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If you look at the picture on the left, you'll see a ladder on the upper right window looking at the entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. You may not believe it, but there's more chance than is usually the case with relics that the church is on the right spot. It's lo...

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(Hat-tip Dale from Faith in Honest Doubt ) Although I intensely dislike the rabid intolerant atheism of people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, it's certainly no worse than the propaganda of some of the more cretinous American God-botherers: http://www.youtube.co...

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Click here if you have 7 spare minutes or so to listen to an excerpt from an ABC Local Radio panel show I usually do on Friday mornings. Update - Roger from Values Australia has also milked the McKillop cow (though rather less light-heartedly than yours truly) as has Adele Hor...

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This is a belated report on a debate on Islam versus Atheism at my campus. It was part of Islamic Awareness Week , orgainsed by the Muslim Students' Association. The official question for debate was 'Should God have a place in the 21st Century?', and the format was pretty stan...

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Alex Stewart has had his 15 minutes of fame, but may live to regret it. Earlier this week he posted a video on Youtube. It showed him smoking lawn-clipping cigarettes that were fashioned out of pages torn from the Bible and the Koran. He compared the taste “scientifically” and...

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So asks Don of Ed . It's sufficiently off-topic to warrant its own thread. Here's my own first stab at the question, but it's doubtless very unsophisticated, and sure to be substantially revised after a robust discussion. Belief has a wide variety of meanings connected by fami...

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Evolutionary psychologists have been busy proposing explanations for religiosity . Belief in transcendent conscious beings might promote survival, they argue, by instilling hope and optimism. Or it might be a by-product of other naturally selected susceptibilities, such as inf...

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I have long viewed sporadically gifted journalist Christopher Hitchens as a caricatured bullying buffoon, but until quite recently I admired Richard Dawkins . Years ago I read The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker with fascination, along with the works of fellow biological...

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Evelyn De Morgan, The Worship of Mammon (1909) An embarrassingly bad story on PM about economics versus Christianity spoiled my drive home on Good Friday. I suppose they need to present something about religion at Easter, but can't they do better than this? The hook for the st...

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From the State Government that brings car racing to our most idyllic park, turns nature reserves over to shooters, refuses to cap political donations, reneges on public transport promises faster than it makes them, and philanders while its health system burns, it's nice to see...

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Interesting development! Last week a UK High Court gave the green light for a green activist to sue his employer, who had sacked him for refusing to do an errand because it conflicted with his green beliefs. For intellectual ballast, the judge quoted no less or, should I say,...

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From Usury Condemned (1643) by John Blaxton At a seminar yesterday the speaker described his project as one of discovering the conditions for an economy without interest on loans. In other words, what would the financial system of the ideal Islamic state be like? This raised a...

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Club 1: Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Cameroon, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Malaysia, Mali, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Sri Lanka. Club 2: Bolivia, Brazil, Gabon, Ghana, Guatemala, In...

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I feel quite angry with Pope Benedict message that "saving homosexual or transsexual behaviour was as important as protecting the enviornment" and that "God's creation was about protecting man from himself". Even some of my own grand children, who are devoted catholics, feel t...

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It's good to have the apology out of the way. It was such a horrible distraction, the failure to apologise such a monumental act of ungenerosity. Nevertheless, and despite its frequent tendentiousness, and despite its ridiculous lumping together of apologies to Muslims for the...

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"La Somme le roy", circa 1300, via Wikipedia I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; very pleasant have you been to me; your love to me was extraordinary, surpassing the love of women. 2 Samuel 1:26 (English Standard Version) What better definition could you ask for of '...

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The Bishop of Harare, Rt Rev Dr Sebastian Bakare, will be in Australia from 20 November to 5 December with a circuit in NSW including Sydney, Nowra, Goulburn, Wagga Wagga, , Dubbo, Tamworth, Coffs Harbour, and Gosford. These matters are not on my normal beat but it seems that...

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Tyler Cowen challenges the idea that the finance markets have failed due to lack of regulation. Not a lack of government intervention , too much, done badly. THERE is a misconception that President Bushs years in office have been characterized by a hands-off approach to regula...

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Is it just me or do other Troppo readers appreciate the irony (or rank hypocrisy depending on your level of cynicism) of the main exponents and proselytisers of fairness and equality in our society apparently applying a completely double standard, when it comes to their own re...

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'One of my closest friends is Turkish, and she won't have anything to do with Muslims, OK?' Camden Council has finally voted on the Quranic Society's development application, and has unanimously voted against it . We now have to wait and see whether the applicants will appeal,...

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Ructions in Boganville: the first Camden protest, back in November A keen follower of events in Camden, I didn't overlook the news that the Camden/Macarthur Residents' Group, led by that great community bridge builder Emil Sremchevich, has announced plans to hold more protests...

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I'm pleased to see that the apparent suicide death of the hideously disfigured and terminally ill Chantal Sebire seems to have reopened the debate about euthanasia in Europe. Pity the same isn't true here in Australia. Apparently her pain couldn't be reduced even with morphine...

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I've just been asked by the Department of PM&C to nominate someone to go to the 202o Summit. Who should I nominate - and why? This post will be moderated strictly. Suggestions should be serious and I hope you'll provide good reasons. Of course there will be people who want to...

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Coming out in March 2008 I've just finished reading American Fascists , in which the famous American war correspondent Chris Hedges presents a deeply unpleasant portrait of the Christian Right. Much of the story will be unsurprising to readers who've been paying attention to t...

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Paddy McGuinness died this morning . He was 69. As a columnist and editor McGuinness thrived on controversy. As Matthew Ricketson wrote , he was "loved and loathed in roughly equal measure, and that is the point -- and the trick -- with such columnists." At Catallaxy, Jason So...

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The papers are reporting that Cardinal Pell is considering denying the Eucharist to politicians who vote for the stem cell bill currently before the NSW Parliament. The use by Catholic bishops of this particular sanction has caused a lot of acrimonious debate in the US, mostly...

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My Sweet Lord ... This story is disappointing if unsurprising: A MANHATTAN art gallery has cancelled its Easter-season exhibit of a life-size chocolate sculpture depicting a naked Jesus, after an outcry by Roman Catholics. The sculpture My Sweet Lord by Cosimo Cavallaro was to...

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To rule is to look ahead, it has been said. Let us therefore cast our eyes at the virtually universal wish of nations and their population to achieve economic growth. Jared Diamond argues in his latest book âCatastropheâ that this âgrowth fetishâ (as Clive Hamilton calls it) m...

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I get irritated when people throw the word 'definitive' around. So ignore the headline which is - in the words of Lady Bracknell - altogether too sensational. But in a recent post of mine that seems to have found its way into the side bar of recent comments for a surprisingly...

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"Let's not be misty-eyed about Friedrich Hayek" says Kevin Rudd , "he taught (and modern Liberals believe) that there is no such thing as social justice and that the only dignity to be delivered to human beings is through their emancipation by free markets untrammelled by the...

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Theos -- Britain's new public theology think tank " We don't do God " said the PM's spin doctor. When Vanity Fair's David Margolick tried to steer Tony Blair into a conversation about his religious beliefs, his director of strategy and communications, Alastair Campbell, butted...

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[photopress:Clive_Hamilton.jpg,full,pp_empty] The left got into trouble when it lost its ethical moorings, said Tony Blair. Influenced by the Christian socialism of John Macmurray , Blair saw New Labour as heir to the communitarian traditions of ethical socialism and New Liber...

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Left and right are both calling for the manic Sheik Al Hilali to be deported from these fair lands. The left take offence at his comparing uncovered women to "raw meat". The right take offense at his support for terrorists. Listening to ABC radio this morning, I seemed to be...

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On Insiders last Sunday, the topic of the day was the growing debacle in Iraq. It included sound bites from the PM, a longer interview with Paul Kelly and some predictable political tap dancing from Kevin stay-on-message Rudd . The armchair discussants included David Marr and...

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I have a particular dislike of Richard Dawkins and enjoyed this demolition of Dawkins' latest attack on God. If you read carefully you'll notice that it's not done on behalf of religion. It does not presupose religious belief. The author - Terry Eagleton concedes, having concl...

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RMIT's Rob Watts attempts to save the welfare state by attacking liberalism Neoconservatives are winning the welfare debate because they take values seriously, says RMIT's Rob Watts . In a recent paper on the welfare-to-work debate ( pdf ) he rejects the idea that the left is...

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Some good lines, courtesy of Tim Harkowitz . If there is no self, whose arthritis is this? Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated? There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was th...

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I enjoyed this post by Mark B as well as Paul Gray's op ed to which he linked and many of the comments on Mark's post. A few days ago I picked up a book of essays by G Lowes Dickinson and here is an extract of the last lecture in a set of lectures he delivered in 1905 entitled...

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Something relevant to today's announcement of a rapprochement betwen the Catholic and Anglican Churches on the subject of Mary, and the impression, in much of Britain, that the Anglican Church is all but dead.. An interesting Times Online article by journalist Ruth Gledhill, c...

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The only good thing about the election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI is that it will put an end to the interminable prattling on current affairs programs , where a motley collection of logacious loquacious priests and self-appointed Vatican experts discuss a Papal e...

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Tim Dunlop has a very nice post up at Road to Surfdom, about his Catholic education Reading it, and the comments people made on it, made me reflect once again on just what it is that my own Catholic education gave me, and the tensions and gifts it bequeathed to me. My experien...

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The death of Pope John Paul II was hardly unexpected, yet it is momentous. This was, I think, a Pope who was perhaps the most exceptionally talented and extraordinary man to fill St Peter's shoes in a long time; one of the great men of the twentieth century, and like all great...

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I'm not inclined to participate further on the debate on non-heterosexualities and school education, partly because I think it's rapidly running its course , and partly because at the moment I can better focus my writing energies on my thesis. So after this post, I'll disappea...

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Rob Corr has put up a very measured post summarising the debate which started with the incident of the student teacher having her prac terminated because she answered children's questions about her same-sex partner over at Kick & Scream . Rob's post is tellingly titled 'Discre...

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Or, the Civil in Civility It's odd that we hear so much about the Judaeo-Christian tradition (usually in the context of values) these days from the Culture Warriors who believe that our values are going to ruin all around us . It's as if, like the artist Frederick Goodall , th...

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Or, Tres Catholique [After Umberto Eco] I had the very great pleasure tonight of showing a couple of friends from Melbourne the wonders of the Valley - or at least that we do good Jazz band (Kafka) and good bar (The Bowery) here in Brisvegas. Or at least, that being a regular...

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Reuters reported about half an hour ago that Prince Charles will marry Camilla Parker-Bowles on the 8th of April . Kim Beazley's recent desire to revive the Republican debate in Australia will now probably get a kick along. However, that will be for the wrong reasons if it's s...

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Andrew Norton at Catallaxy recently published a scathing review of Marion Maddox' book God Under Howard . His scorn for this work by someone very loosely described by her publisher as "the leading authority on the intersection of religion and politics" in Australia is justifie...

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My grandmother died on 16 November 2004 and I, along with her other three grandsons, was a pallbearer at her funeral. One thing that was moving was a photo of her as a young woman on her coffin. The Catholic Church is now moving to restrict such personal touches : Placing meme...

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I'm more and more convinced the world morphed into postmodern weirdness when I wasn't looking. Or there's been some sort of Gwyneth Paltrow like time distortion parallel universe thing happening. This just in : People are to be tortured in laboratories at Oxford University in...

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Miss Piss at piss'n'vinegar is rightly horrified by a proposed law in Virginia requiring women who have a miscarriage to report it to the police within 12 hours - on pain of a fine or gaol term. In a discussion on Michael's post on Pentecostalism , Irant expressed some sceptic...

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A while back I criticised dogmatism among atheists as well as an excess of certainty in belief. The question of theodicy , as I noted a few days ago , is popping up again and again in the wake of the Tsunami tragedy. To some degree, I think this debate now has a momentum of it...

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A Guest Post by Michael Carden Pentecostalism was much discussed in the leadup to and aftermath of the Australian election, with much debate around the link between churches such as Hillsong and the Liberal Party and the politics of Family First. For a lot of commentators and...

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The debate on theodicy continues. In the SMH , Linda Morris elicits "qualified opinions" . This has to rank as a cheap shot, surely: After all, why is it, ponders Alan Nichols, acting director of Public Theology for the Evangelical Alliance of Australia, that religious organis...

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Dean Philip Jensen, whose views on the Tsunami we've discussed here and here , has been calling talback in the wee hours, according to the SMH . (Thanks to commenter yellowvinyl for drawing this to my attention). The Dean must have felt that he needed to explain why he was cal...

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To coincide with the release of the Cabinet Papers from 1974, The Currency Lad wrote a rather acerbic post on Gough Whitlam . Some how or other (as you do in the blogosphere), I ended up debating the contribution that Islamic civilization has made with a number of commenters o...

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As Geoff observed in a previous thread, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams , wrote an op/ed piece for the UK Telegraph conceding that faith may be disturbed by the horrible disaster in Asia : The question, 'How can you believe in a God who permits suffering on thi...

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As part of the discussion in the thread about inappropriate responses to the Tsunami tragedies , it was noted that Immanuel Rant had criticised the Anglican Dean of Sydney, Phillip Jensen's remarks about God's will ... Dean Jensen was quoted as saying "the will of God involved...

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Via Suzoz at Personal Political , I've just discovered and read this interesting column about raising kids without any religion by Adele Horin in the SMH . Some time ago, the British sociologist Anthony Giddens , until recently Director of the LSE, noted that one marker of a p...

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If my reckoning is correct, I've missed Gaudate Sunday. I was horribly late this year in purchasing Advent candles. I'm normally a very observant cultural Catholic . It should be the third Sunday of Advent, that is to say, a week ago. The great thing about Advent candles (a bi...

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"Angelus Novus" - Paul Klee Mein Fl¼gel ist zum Schwung bereit, ich kehrte gern zur¼ck, denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit, ich h¤tte wenig Gl¼ck. - Gerherd Scholem, 'Gruss vom Angelus' The Currency Lad has been busy ranking Australia's Prime Ministers . Gary Sauer-Thompson ov...

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Louise Dodson, writing in today's SMH , claims that the battle for the Catholic vote is not over. Bishop Kevin Manning, Catholic Bishop of Parramatta , had some acerbic and pointed remarks to make about the possibility of changes to the Industrial Relations laws by a coalition...

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I recently posted on the imbroglio swirling around St. Mary's Catholic Community in South Brisbane. Today, Father Peter Kennedy of St. Mary's takes Archbishop Bathersby to task in the Courier-Mail . Fr Peter accuses the Church of being out of step with a democratic society. Th...

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In my post on Redfern , I referred in passing to the the actions of Sydney Archbishop Cardinal Pell in appointing conservative Priests from the Neo-Catechumenate movement to St. Vincent's, once the parish of Fr Ted Kennedy and a hub for the Indigenous community - a subject of...

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Yes, you read correctly. The great German sociologist Max Weber once answered the perennial question of whether religion was primarily conservative or progressive in nature through a discussion of theodicy. His answer was that it can be either. Theodicy is the philosophical pr...

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John Gray provocatively begins his interesting article "The Curious Dogmatism of Atheists" ( reprinted in Friday's Fin ) with the assertion that - A revival of atheism is a curious byproduct of the September 11 attacks. We've read a lot recently about religion and politics, wh...

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Or is Wicca a legitimate religion? Sophie's stirred Troppo commenters up into a debate questioning whether membership of the Church of Satan ought to be considered a legitimate religion. Among other things, I do some work in the sociology of religion, and having published some...

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