Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

Guess What? Traditional Marriage Doesn’t Exist

June 18, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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The U.S. Supreme Court, any day now, will issue a decision about gay marriage as it considers the constitutionality of the federal Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8, the two cases with a potentially huge impact for the more than 600,000 gay couples in the United States. Many conservatives are concerned about this ruling, believing that a federal acceptance of gay unions would constitute a fundamental change in the nature of marriage. “A broad negative ruling could redefine marriage in the law throughout the entire country,” the United States Conference of Catholic ... Read More

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Talking About ‘God’ With Galen Guengerich

June 6, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Galen Guengerich.

Study after study after study suggests that more and more Americans are walking away from traditional religion. Last October, the Pew Research Center found that one-fifth of the U.S. public and one-third of adults under the age of 30 do not identify with any religion. It marked the highest rate of religiously unaffiliated people ever recorded in the polling organization's history. Likewise, sociologists from the University of California-Berkeley and Duke University recently found that religious affiliation in the U.S. has dropped to its lowest point since researchers began keeping track ... Read More

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Waiting for a Miracle

May 21, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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People with advanced cancer tend to get more aggressive care at the end of life and spend more time in the intensive care unit if they receive spiritual support from their religious communities, according to a new study. The report's lead researcher said that finding was "quite the opposite" of what her team was expecting—in part because of evidence that spiritual support coming from within a patient's medical team leads to less aggressive care and more use of hospice. In the new study, spiritual patients who reported high levels of support from their religious communities were two to ... Read More

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Thoughts of Faith and God Decrease Tolerance for Ambiguity

May 16, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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It’s clear that religious faith confers a variety of benefits. Being part of a community of fellow believers has been shown to boost both mental and physical health. But at what cost? New research suggests one disturbing answer: Thoughts of faith and God apparently spur people to view the world in black-or-white terms. A just-published study finds exposure to Christian concepts or imagery increases one’s intolerance for ambiguity. This dynamic was demonstrated in a variety of experiments conducted in three different countries: Germany, Austria, and the United States. Writing in ... Read More

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Ghana Bans Killing of Children

April 30, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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This is real. Well, now it's not real, I guess. No longer will children born with disabilities be killed in order to free a village from evil. In Ghana's northern Kasena-Nankana region, babies born with disabilities—and sometimes even babies born at the same time from some misfortune that befell their family—were considered "spirit children," as in "possessed by evil spirits." To fix that, "concoction men" would make the babies drink poison. And then they would die. From the BBC: Mr. Ayine, from the campaign group Afrikids, said he was "saddened that in today's era, a child ... Read More

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Emotional Reactions of Atheists May Reveal Echoes of Belief

April 26, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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The heads and hearts of atheists may not be on precisely the same page. That’s the implication of recently published research from Finland, which finds avowed non-believers become emotionally aroused when daring God to do terrible things. “The results imply that atheists’ attitudes toward God are ambivalent, in that their explicit beliefs conflict with their affective response,” concludes a research team led by University of Helsinki psychologist Marjaana Lindeman. Its study is published in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion. Lindeman and her colleagues ... Read More

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The Cult of Nutrition

April 19, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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Editor's Note: This post originally appeared on RealClearScience, a Pacific Standard partner site. Listen closely. I'm going to tell you how you can change your life. Chances are, we've all heard that one before. It's a salesman's pitch, meant to play off our latent insecurities while evoking hopeful wonderment. Despite the statement's banality, to many, it's an irresistible call. Even the skeptical can be enticed. After all, there's no harm in listening.... But if you turn away, you could miss out on something spectacular, transformational, or even revolutionary. And when you listen, ... Read More

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Science Degrees Lacking Among Catholic Cardinals

March 11, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment

In terms of their academic pursuits, the cardinals who will choose the next pope are a pretty monolithic bunch. That nugget of insight is courtesy of Anthony Judge, who has created an interesting chart on his website Laetus in Praesens. In it, he lists all of the current cardinals who are eligible to vote, and the discipline or disciplines they focused on during their years of higher education. The information is from Wikipedia, so it may not be entirely accurate; Judge labels details that haven’t been verified. The first thing that strikes you is that, in Judge’s words, “very few ... Read More

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Pope Benedict the Liberal: America’s Misunderstanding of the Outgoing Pontiff

February 12, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
(PHOTO: VIPFLASH/SHUTTERSTOCK)

There’s a moment in Keith Richards’ recent memoir when he pauses his tale of addiction and debauchery to reflect that, once a certain number of stories about his excesses had been told and retold in public, his reputation became fixed. No countervailing or complicating evidence of moderation could change it. “Image is like a long shadow,” he writes. “Even when the sun goes down, you can see it.” In this, and most likely nothing else, the Rolling Stones’ guitarist is a bit like Pope Benedict XVI. When Benedict delivered last year’s address to the Vatican diplomatic corps, it ... Read More

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Pew Research: One-Third of Those Under 30 Are Religiously Unaffiliated

October 9, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

A report published by the Pew Research Center (pdf) today indicates that almost 20 percent of U.S. adults polled reported no religious affiliation, that 32 percent of those under the age of 30 reported no affiliation—and that both of these numbers are on the rise. The data, by the Forum on Religion and Public Life group at Pew, was based on telephone interviews with 2,973 U.S. adults around the beginning of this July. The study credits the overall rise in non-religious affiliations (up almost 5 percent in the last five years) to generational replacement—that growing number of young ... Read More

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