Back in the 1980s, during the reign of Pope John Paul II, conservative Roman Catholics minted a pejorative term for their coreligionists who thought independently, sometimes daring to differ with the Vatican over matters including contraception, homosexuality, women priests, and eating meat on Fridays. (Oh, right, the Vatican canceled that restriction a few decades ago--although some churches still put our calendars with half-tone images of fish on every Friday--along with the concept of Limbo as the permanent home of unbaptized babies.) Critics called such free-thinkers "cafeteria Catholics." In 1986, the magazine Fidelity wrote: "'Cafeteria Catholicism' allows us to pick those 'truths' by which we will measure our lives as Catholics." At the time I found this odd, having grown up in the church at a time when, even in parochial schools, we were taught the primacy of conscience. The term also lost much of its sting when national surveys showed that a majority of American Catholics ignored the church's doctrine against birth control and even abortion. But cafeteria Catholicism has had a surprising resurgence recently.

As he lay dying, one of the last acts the Prophet Muhammad performed was to use a twig called a miswak to clean his teeth. According to oral tradition, the Prophet often advocated the use of a tooth stick, made from a twig of a tree (Salvadora persica) that is believed to strengthen the gums, prevent tooth decay, eliminate toothaches and bad breath, improve the sense of taste, and make the teeth shine. Is this merely folklore, or pious religious dogma? In fact, some 25 years ago the World Health Organization began recommending the use of the miswak. And a 2003 scientific study concluded that people who used the miswak had better results than those using a toothbrush.

"There are 2 kinds of knowledge," the Prophet said, "knowledge of
religion and knowledge of the body." The body? Many religions would seem to
prefer we didn't have one, but Muhammad often talked about food, spices, and
the ritual of eating, believing that God preferred people to eat in groups.

"Involvement is its own reward," my therapist Gary used to say, back when I thought psychotherapy could help me. If that's true, I've wondered for the past few decades why young people weren't involved in political activism. "What happened to the '60s?" my friends would say. "We stopped the Vietnam War. We started the women's movement. Where are the kids now? Why aren't they doing anything?"Yeah, I would think, we did all that 40 years ago. And then we started worrying about our careers, or we got high, or both. We got into punk rock and loft jazz, or raising a family, or spiritual practice. But then Reagan was elected and everything started really going downhill.

According to The Economist,  "AT LEAST 25 Christian music festivals are held each summer in America, but they have never catered for theological liberals. Until this year, that is, when the Wild Goose Festival--named after a Celtic symbol for the Holy Spirit--kicked off on June 23rd on 72 wooded acres in eastern North Carolina, not so far from the intellectual hub of Raleigh-Durham.

The idea, seven years in the making, was based on Britain's Greenbelt Festival in Cheltenham, which draws 20,000 people a year. About 1,500 people came to the American version, which explicitly pitched its appeal to artists and musicians, nonconformists, post-Christians, non-Christians, disaffected evangelicals and a liberal evangelical subset known as the "emergent" church."

I was recently watching the old monster movie, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, and realized that when I watched these movies as a child I believed that humans and dinosaurs lived together on the earth. I know the fossil record doesn't support this, but this article makes an intriguing argument:

Most of us loved reading about dinosaurs at some time in our lives. In 1993, the movie "Jurassic Park" stimulated the public interest in dinosaurs far beyond its previous level. As a result, increasing numbers of people have thought, "Since we have found all these fossils and dinosaur bones, we know dinosaurs existed. How come they are not mentioned in the Bible?"

  One of the more exciting developments in the mass demonstrations in Cairo over the past two weeks has been the coming together of Muslims and Christians in opposition to the oppressive government of Hosni Mubarak. Coptic Christians make up roughly 10 percent of the Egyptian population, or about 8 million people, and are the largest Christian minority in the Middle East. Muslim youth have taken to guarding Coptic Christian churches, which have been attacked during previous disturnaces. And for their part, Christian youth stood guard to protect Muslims as they prayed at Tahrir Square in Cairo, knowing that people at prayer are vulnerable to the secret police. According to AP, one Coptic priest, Father Ihab al-Kharat, gave a sermon on Sunday in which he said, "In the name of Jesus and Muhammad we unify our ranks. . . . We will keep protesting until the fall of the tyranny."

Kirk Cameron has starred in several films based on the Left Behind books--a series of 16 best-selling novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins that dramatize what's technically known as Christian eschatology (ESS-ka-TOL-a-gee). That's the collective term for the End Times-- what will presumably happen when Jesus returns to rule over the Earth, either before or after a period of tribulation. (End Time believers disagree on the details, and the scriptures they quote are ambiguous at best.) Apparently, the fact that Cameron is also a Christian evangelist makes him the go-to guy for End Time information.
     That led CNN's Anderson Cooper to ask Cameron in an interview what he thinks of the notion that there might be a connection between the unexplained sudden deaths of thousands of birds and the Second Coming. "Well, I first think that they ought to call a veterinarian, not me," Cameron replied. "I think it's really kind of silly to equate birds falling out of the sky with some kind of an End Times theory." Cameron acknowledged that people have a "fascination with the religiously mysterious,": and with prophecy, from Nostradamus to the Bible, but he feels the connection to birds falling from the sky "has more to do with pagan mythology" and divination based on the directions in which birds flew at certain moments.
     Finally, asked if working in films based on the End Times prophecies affected his life or beliefs in any way, Cameron dismissed the idea. It made him think "I'm probably going to die of some other cause before this happens. A friend of mine just died yesterday," and that made me think that "life is short, and I need to be ready whenever it is that God decides to end my life here on earth." That's a mindset that might be embraced by non-Christians as well.
     Cameron is now working on a documentary that will retrace "the escape route of the Pilgrims."

    
All right, let's get the sexy part of the discussion out of the way first. I believe that Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha's epochal book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality, has the potential to manifest change in the way we think about and experience sex at least as radically as prior works by Alfred Kinsey and Masters and Johnson. The authors, a research psychologist (with a BA in English Lit) and a psychiatrist, respectively, write with such good humor and compassion, even when they are openly deriding the work of evolutionary biologists and classical philosophers alike, that I often laughed out loud while rethinking what I thought I knew about human sexuality. Although their basic premise sounds novel, if not revolutionary (I don't read a lot of evolutionary biology, so I could be wrong about that), I was already comfortable with enough of the corollaries they present to give them the benefit of the doubt on the rest.
     In brief, the authors argue that our closest primate ancestors (chimpanzees and bonobos) evolved in a way that puts the lie to what they label "the standard narrative" that has ruled our vision of human history from the caveman to Victorian novels: aggressive males competing for possession of and dominion over "coy" females. Instead, they propose, the real competition was taking place among countless sperm cells from a variety of donors. 

A woman came to me recently for an Archetypal reading, because she was suffering from a blockage in her work. Six months before, she had submitted a business proposal regarding a creative project to someone who was in a position to make it happen, and who had promised to get back to her as soon as possible. When she hadn't heard back three months later, she sent an e-mail inquiry, but received no response. She not only felt blocked in continuing her work on the project, but also a good deal of self-judgment and guilt for her failure to get results. They had been introduced by a mutual friend, and had established a certain personal connection, so her path of action was further clouded by these emotional concerns.

 My intuitive insight was that she needed to call the other person directly on the phone, and, if she couldn't get past the receptionist, to send a hand-written letter. She was reluctant to take these steps, though, and after I described some of the archetypal patterns I saw complicating her situation, she asked for a reading. Among other things, the reading revealed the Damsel in her house of relationships (including business partnership) and the Saboteur in her house of creativity and good fortune. I explained that she had to take charge of the situation by following up, rather than waiting for an imaginary Knight to rescue her, thereby sabotaging her best interests.