Explicit New Social Media Guidance for Army Chaplains Follows String of MRFF...
On May 14, twenty Christian Nationalist members of Congress wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Mark T. Esper, decrying the success of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) in getting...
View ArticleIndians 101: Some Pawnee ceremonies
For most of the world’s 7,000 different religions, the emphasis is on ceremonies and the sense of community rather than on any particular set of beliefs. One example of this can be seen among the...
View ArticleReligion 102: African Ancestor Worship
Ancestor worship or ancestor veneration is among the world’s oldest religious practices. Ancestor worship is based on the belief that the deceased continue to have an active interest in the daily...
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Indians 301: Smohalla's Dreamer Religion
The Columbia Plateau is an area that stretches from the Rocky Mountains in the east to the Cascade Mountains in the west. It is cut by the Columbia River. For thousands of years, many different Indian...
View ArticleIndians 101: The Southern Plains Vision Quest
The Southern Plains lie south of the Arkansas Rivervalley. It includes Oklahoma, Arkansas, portions of Texas, the eastern foothills of New Mexico, and portions of Louisiana. This area was the homeland...
View ArticleReligion 101: Women and marriage under ancient Irish Brehon law
Long before Ireland became Christian, the pagan Irish had a religious and legal system organized by the Druids. The Druids were a combination of priests, prophets, and astrologers, and they also served...
View ArticleSuppressing peyote in 1916
Welcome to the Street Prophets Coffee Hour cleverly hidden at the intersection of religion and politics. This is an open thread where we can share our thoughts and comments about the day. Following the...
View ArticleReligion 102: The concept of the soul
One of the common features of most—but not all—religious traditions throughout the world is the belief that human beings are more than just physical bodies. Humans are felt to have a non-physical...
View ArticleIndians 101: Sky burials
The European invasion of North America brought with it not only new people, new animals, and new diseases, but also a new religion—Christianity--with burial customs that were strange to the indigenous...
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Religion 102: Magic
Closely associated with religion is magic, although some writers feel it is separate from religion and others see it as a part of religion. Magic involves the manipulation of physical objects to...
View ArticleAncient America: Solar Calendars
For people all over the world, an accurate understanding of the seasons and an ability to predict them was and is essential to survival. With the advent of farming, knowledge of the seasons became even...
View ArticleReligion 102: Ancestor worship in China
Ancestor worship or ancestor veneration are among the world’s oldest religious practices. Ancestor worship is based on the belief that the deceased continue to have an active interest in the daily...
View ArticleAncient America: The Aztec concept of the afterworld
When the Spanish began their conquest of Mexico in the sixteenth century, they encountered the Aztec Empire, a large and sophisticated civilization. The Aztec empire was not particularly ancient—the...
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Indians 101: A very short overview of the Northern Plains Sun Dance
For many, if not most, of the Northern Plains tribes, the Sun Dance was the central ceremony and often served as a unifying force to bring together the various hunting bands. Usually held when the...
View ArticleHuman Origins: Religion and the brain
Both language and religion are symbol systems, and both are human universals suggesting that the basis for both is innate. Language, unlike religion, has anatomical components, including the larynx,...
View ArticleHuman Origins: Schizophrenia and religion
Religion is a human universal and in looking for the origins of religion, some researchers are looking at brain disorders. One of the ways that neuroscientists discover the workings of the brain is by...
View ArticleTrump Defense Dept. Appointee Changes Military Religion Regulations to Allow...
It seems that Matthew P. Donovan, Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, champion of the Space Force, is now the champion of the fundamentalist Christian lawmakers who are on a mission...
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Indians 101: Supernatural beings
The mythologies of many American Indian religious traditions include stories of supernatural entities. When Europeans encountered these stories, they interpreted them through a filter of Greek, Roman,...
View ArticleAncient America: Effigy Mounds
Our American and Canadian heritage begins long before Columbus supposedly “discovered” the Americas. For thousands of years people have lived in North America and they built cities and towns which...
View ArticleIndians 201: Sacred places in New England
The cultural landscape of American Indians is filled with sacred sites which are described in their oral traditions. There are two basic kinds of sacred sites: (1) those which are sacred because of...
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