Terry Firma, though born and Journalism-school-educated in Europe, has lived in the U.S. for the past 20-odd years. Stateside, his feature articles have been published in the New York Times, Reason, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Wired. Terry was the founder and Main Mischief Maker of Moral Compass, a now-dormant site that pokes fun at the delusional claim by people of faith that a belief in God equips them with superior moral standards. He was the Editor-in-Chief of two Manhattan-based magazines until he decided to give up commercial publishing for professional photography... with a lot of blogging on the side. These days, he lives in an old seaside farmhouse in Maine with his wife, three kids, and two big dogs.
Let’s give him props for honesty: The archbishop of Canterbury — the spiritual leader of the world’s 80 million Anglican Christians — has admitted he sometimes doubts whether God actually exists. Justin Welby made the comments during a relaxed interview in front of an audience at Bristol Cathedral, in England. “There are moments, sure, where you think, ‘Is there a God? Where is God?'” The archbishop, who is also the leader of the Church of England, added that his admission was “probably not what the archbishop of Canterbury should be saying.” #453551104 / gettyimages.com Read more
Pakistan’s Express Tribune reports that in Mubarakabad, Punjab, a pir (Sufi master) named Muhammad Sabir was so convinced he could perform miracles, he asked for a volunteer he could murder. Not to worry, Sabir told his followers: after killing his victim, he would reanimate the dead man and make him as good as new. He announced that he could breathe life back into a dead man. The pir gave the condition that the victim must be married and have children. I mean, who doesn’t like a high-stakes bet, amirite? Read more
My friend Benjamin Corey, a fellow Patheos blogger and Christian author, recently wrote that [P]rayer is often the most effective tool a Christian has. Effective? He’ll be visiting in a couple of weeks, and I intend to ask him, over beers, what that means. I don’t doubt that prayer can be a means of quieting or soothing your mind, like meditation. In that sense, it’s perfectly benign, even positive. (Evidently, prayer can mean many things to many people, as this fairly insipid advice from Andrew W.K. shows. Hemant wrote a very good response to it here.) Read more
Cardinal Timothy Dolan can’t bear to say goodbye to his hero and shining example, the late Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. In the fifties, Sheen presented an Emmy-winning Catholic TV show that affected a young Dolan greatly. Sheen’s remains have been entombed in a crypt in New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral since 1979, the year of his death. The trouble is that the man was born in Peoria, Illinois, whose diocese lays claim to the body: It has drawn up blueprints for an elaborate shrine in its main cathedral to house his tomb and sketched out an entire devotional campus it hopes to complete when its campaign to have him declared the first American-born male saint succeeds. … Now the dispute over Archbishop Sheen’s corpse has brought a halt to his rise to sainthood, just as he appeared close to beatification, the final stage before canonization. Bishop Daniel R. Jenky, Peoria’s leader, announced this month that the process had been suspended because New York would not release the body. Read more
Who knew? Terrorist snuff movies are a great recruiting tool, because previously lukewarm young Islamists go gaga over them. That’s according to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) at King’s College London, reports the Guardian. Barbarous online films, such as the two-and-a half-minute video showing the killing of British aid worker David Haines released on Saturday night, are “turning on” jihadists in countries such as Tunisia and Libya who had previously reacted coolly to the civil war between the Sunni fundamentalists of Isis and the Shia minorities in Syria and Iraq. Read more
