[DM] “Hans Rosling: Religions and babies”

Over at Demography Matters, I point–thanks to Will Baird–to a 2012 TED talk by the Gapminder Foundation‘s Hans Rosling, examining the question of the relationship between religion and fertility.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Bag News Notes features multiple interesting brief photo essays: one about the downloadable gun; one about the woman miraculously rescued from the wreckage of the factory in Bangladesh; one about how modernism, done right, can be quite beautiful.
• At Beyond the Beyond, Bruce Sterling links to a critique of the English words and terms used by European Union officials and to a description of the post-democratic “info-state”.
• Crooked Timber commemorates the conviction of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Mott by noting that Ronald Reagan spoke highly of him.
• At A Fistful of Euros, Edward Hugh introduces the work of a blogger who suggests that, between emigration and the consequences of a low birth rate, Portugal’s economy is set to crater.
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Robert Farley considers Edward Hugh’s suggestion that some countries might face state failure as depopulation proceeds.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen seems to like Feedly as an alternative to Google Reader.
• Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín blogs about the way in people transgressed identities–national, occupational, and so on–can be quite commonsensical while others who don’t get this can be stuck.
• Savage Minds interviews journalist and anthropologist Sarah Kendzior about experience in her two professions.
• Strange Maps links to a map of chimpanzee and bonobo populations in central Africa, divided not only by their behaviour (the first violent, the second sexual) but by the Congo River.
• Une heure de peine’s Denis Colombi tackles the idea that French emigrants are refugees fleeing a hostile environment at home, as opposed to being mobile professionals in a global workplace.
• The Volokh Conspiracy’s Ilya Somin argues that judicial rulings legalizing same-sex marriage have not harmed same-sex marriage at the ballot box.
• Window on Eurasia touches on the ethnic divisions among Russian Buddhists–Kalmyks, Tuvans, Buryats–that is preventing the establishment of a Buddhist sanctuary in Moscow.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• In one of his first posts since moving back to Toronto, Acts of Minor Treason’s Andrew Barton describes coming across the immediate aftermath of a terrible accident (or “accident”) at Union station and wondering about the lack of empathy expressed by commuters.
• Bag News Notes features a post from South Side Chicago resident and photographer Jon Lowenstein, who caught the immediate aftermath of a shooting in his neighbourhood.
• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster describes the dreams of American rocket pioneer robert Goddard of interstellar migrations.
• At Crooked Timber, Eric Rauchway documents that Keynes’ concern about the consequences of war indemnities on the economies of Germany and central Europe long predated any sexual affair with Germans.
• Daniel Drezner notes how off-base Marc Lynch’s statement that the ongoing war in Syria undermines a pleasant narrative of the Arab Spring is, since there was plenty of suffering beforehand.
• Extraordinary Observations’ Rob Pitingolo doesn’t like it when cyclists are in too much of a hurry pay attention to red lights, other vehicle drivers too.
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, B. Spencer argues that guns in the United States are much more a fetishistic icon of belonging than anything else like resisting government oppression.
• Mark Simpson reposts his 2001 review of Niall Ferguson’s book The Cash Nexus.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen notes that Jamaica has seen sustained austerity for decades and also flat economic growth. Connection? And what of Europe?
• Torontoist notes that plans for a proposed shopping centre in Kensington Market along Bathurst Street have been released. Controversy will ensue.
• Window on Eurasia notes statistics suggesting that only 3% of Russians attended the Russian Orthodox Church’s Easter services.

[LINK] “After cathedral clash, Copts doubt future in Egypt”

I’ve been mulling over Ulf Laessing’s Reuters article recounting general despair among Egypt’s Copts that they can ever find themselves at home in their country, and that to save themselves they must leave, since the article’s publication on the 11th of this month. Is there some exaggeration afoot, or are things really that irresolvably bad? (I will note that Mubarak’s regime was hardly especially kind to Christians, either; ongoing issues with religious freedom in Egypt seem to long predate 2011.)

When Egyptian Christian Kerollos Maher watched on television as petrol bombs and rocks rained on Cairo’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral he had only one thought – emigration.

“Egypt is no longer my country,” said the 24-year-old construction worker, standing in the courtyard of the country’s largest cathedral where one Copt and one Muslim died in sectarian clashes this week.

“The situation of Christians is worsening from day to day. I’ve given up hope that things will improve,” he said.

Christians, who make up a tenth of Egypt’s 84 million people, have been worrying about the rise of militant Islamists since the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

But after days of fighting at the cathedral and a town outside Cairo killing eight – the worst sectarian strife since Islamist President Mohamed Mursi was elected in June – many Copts now question whether they have a future in Egypt.

An angry young fringe of a community that has lived in Egypt since the earliest days of Christianity may also be turning to violence.

“The attack on the cathedral was the crossing of a red line,” said Michael Sanouel, a 23-year old technician in a steel plant. Sanouel rushed to the cathedral “to defend it” when he heard about the clashes that lasted more than five hours.

“I have been looking for a while for a job abroad, in Italy or Germany,” he said, standing next to a piece of charred wood from a tree hit by a petrol bomb hurled over the compound wall.

“I have two children but I don’t want them to grow up under a Muslim Brotherhood regime,” said Sanouel, who slept in the cathedral compound like dozens of others after the clashes, ready to defend it if more confrontations erupted.

[LINK] “In France, Foreign Aid in the Form of Priests”

Maïa de la Baume‘s New York Times article describes the repetition, in the Roman Catholic communities of France, of a pattern I’ve read of elsewhere in Roman Catholic communities elsewhere in the world where the numbers of parishoners taking holy orders have dropped off: priests migrate from Third World countries, often former colonies, to take over congregations in the former colonizer.

I’m not inclined to think this a good strategy. In the countries which receive these clerical migrants, differences between the priest’s perceptions of the norms of acceptable religious practice and the congregation’s can be quite serious (conservatives priests and liberal parishoners are the conflictual combination I’ve heard of), perhaps enough to create greater conflict between the Church and its members and so worsen things. In the countries which send well-trained clerics, meanwhile, the brain-drain of priests can weaken the position of a Church that is still, despite its vigour, new on the ground.

In Togo, the Rev. Rodolphe Folly used to conduct exuberant Sunday services for a hundred believers of all ages, who sang local gospel music and went up to him to offer what they had.

In this quiet town in Burgundy, he preaches to a more somber audience of about 40 gray-haired retirees in an unadorned 19th-century church that can accommodate up to 600 people.

“In my country, we applaud, we acclaim, we shout,” said Father Folly, a Roman Catholic priest who spoke in the living room of his modern, modest house. “Here, even when I ask people to shake hands, they say no.”

Father Folly, 45, has settled in this town of about 9,000 residents, assigned to replace an aging priest. He has brought his jovial smile and good heart to a place where religious practice is weak, as it is in many other areas of France. He is part of a battalion of priests who have come to France from abroad — from places like Benin, Burkina-Faso, Cameroon but also Vietnam and Poland — who now represent about 10 percent of France’s declining clerical ranks.

[. . .]

The flow of priests from the developing world to wealthier churches in the West amounts to a brain drain within the church. The ratio of priests to parishes is just as bad, if not worse, in the developing world as it is in the West, but the Western nations have the resources to relocate and support these foreign priests. Bishops from Europe and the United States recruit priests from the global south in ad hoc arrangements with local bishops and religious orders, usually without any involvement from the Vatican. The flow of Catholic missionaries, who used to leave France, Italy, Ireland and the United States for the developing world, has now been largely reversed.

The decline of the priesthood as a vocation is particularly pronounced in France, a country that defines itself as secular. Magnificent churches dot the country, but France’s clergy is old and ordinations of priests are in continuing decline. The average age of France’s 14,000 priests is 72.

About 1,600, the number of foreign priests has nearly tripled over the last eight years, with many being recruited to parishes in urban areas and the Parisian suburbs.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• A Budding Sociologist or not, Dan Hirschman has a fascinating Q&A up with Canada-based economist Morten Jerven talking about the extent to which economic–and other–statistics in Africa are flawed.
• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait notes the landmark discovery of a distant supernova, a Type 1A supernova 10.5 billion light years away (and 10.5 billion years in the past).
• Bag News Notes comments on the “Jew in a Box” display of a Berlin museum. Providing contemporary German museum-goers with a volunteer Jew to talk about their Jewish experiences may be well-intentioned, but it also has obvious negative echoes.
• Beyond the Beyond’s Bruce Sterling links to an interesting essay on the ethics of geoengineering.
• Eastern Approaches visits a desolate, impoverished town in Bulgaria.
• New APPS Blog takes on the ridiculous philosophizing of libertarian economist Steven Landsberg, who suggested that no harm is done to a person–a woman, naturally-who was raped while she was unconscious.
• Progressive Download’s John Farrell is quite unimpressed with the Vatican’s latest statement about the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. Something peer-reviewed and new, not just a remining of old data, would be nice.
• Steve Munro talks about various developments in Toronto transit.
• Understanding Society’s Daniel Little takes a look at Jonathan Haidt’s theory about the natural origins of moral intuitions.

[LINK] “The Pope From Beyond the Seas”

In a blog post at the Chronicle of Higher Education, scholar of religion and globalization Philip Jenkins makes the point that, in many respects, Argentina is the perfect point of origin for the first non-European Pope: a Latin American country of note that’s also a leading neo-Europe, arguably the most Italian country by descent and culture outside of Italy, a church of the Global South dealing with the problems of secularization much like the Church in the Global North.

For decades the prospect of a pope from outside Europe has both excited and alarmed observers of the Roman Catholic Church. As the number of Catholics has grown steadily in the Global South, the continuing domination of the church by European prelates has seemed ever more unjust. By 2030 nearly 80 percent of the world’s Catholics will live in Africa, Asia, or Latin America, and Africa will be home to more Catholics than Europe itself. Is such a church to be headed forever by those from Western Europe, a region rapidly succumbing to secularism?

The shift was going to come, and when it did, no country was better suited to provide the pathbreaker than Argentina. Finally we see a pope who can claim to speak for Latin America and the non-European world. For Catholics of the Global South, the symbolic move is decisive and probably marks the start of an indefinite sequence of non-European popes.

[. . .]

The more we examine Argentina, the more perfect Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio seems as a choice, even for the more conservative Europeans. If we imagine an Italian cardinal grumbling at being forced to look overseas for a pope, it quickly becomes clear why an Argentine would be the most attractive choice. While North Americans tend to lump Latin American countries together, Argentina is in fact distinctive.

It is by far the most European nation on its continent, and specifically the most Italian. People of Italian heritage represent a large proportion of its population, and in the late 19th century it was the favored destination of those Italian migrants who did not head to the United States. Of course the country has plenty of other ethnic groups, notably Germans and Syrians/Lebanese, but it is the Italian character that has most profoundly marked Argentina’s society and politics. Just as the British see Australia and New Zealand as distant cousins, so many Italians regard Argentina.

Argentina is also notably European in its history and tradition. It is Latin American, yes, but emphatically not part of the third world. At least through the 1950s, Argentina was definitively part of the advanced West, the first world, to the point that economists wrote learned essays on why Argentina had succeeded so thoroughly while other colonial possessions, like Australia, remained in the doldrums of underdevelopment and colonial exploitation. Right up to the 1940s, Buenos Aires was one of the world’s largest and most sophisticated cities, commonly fifth in line after London, New York, Paris, and Berlin.

Moreover, unlike other Latin American countries such as Mexico or Brazil, Argentina has only a small surviving Native or Indian population, so questions of religious inculturation scarcely arise.

Additionally, the Argentine church faces problems that are immediately recognizable from Rome or Madrid. While the country has small Pentecostal and evangelical minorities, they are nowhere near as strong as in neighboring Brazil or Chile. Instead, the greatest challenge comes from secularism; perhaps 15 percent declare themselves nonreligious, and the great majority of self-declared Catholics practice the faith minimally, if at all. Many notional Catholics spurn the church’s attempts to intervene in the public realm.

[LINK] “Argentine pope: A reflection of Catholicism ‘south of the equator’ “

Ed Stocker’s Christian Science Monitor article touches upon Argentine national and Latin American regional pride in the selection of Buenos Aires cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as Pope. As Stocker notes later in the article, the theme of growth in the Global South is undermined somewhat by the growth of non-Catholic sects in traditionally Catholic areas and the spread of secular norms elsewhere. (Argentina, it should be noted, adopted same-sex marriage with majority supporter before France or the United Kingdom.)

As news spread that the Catholic Church’s most powerful position had gone to a non-European for the first time in more than 1,000 years residents of Argentina’s capital were scrambling to double check their smartphones – and asking each other if the news was really true.

Local media outlets had largely dismissed the idea of Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, as a papal front-runner, largely because he had lost out to Pope Benedict XVI in 2005 and was an older-than-average 76. Speculation rested, instead, on a possible Italian, Canadian, or even Brazilian candidate.

But as it was confirmed that Latin America – where 40 percent of the globe’s Catholics reside – had produced its first pope, crowds quickly began to swell outside Buenos Aires’ cathedral in the city’s main square. The young crowd shouted that they were “the pope’s youth,” waving the yellow and white colors of the papacy alongside Argentine national flags and pictures of the Virgin Mary. At one point, revelers burst into a rendition of the national anthem, and others repeatedly chanted “Francisco,” or Francis, the adopted name of the new pontiff.

Latinos have a great affection for the pope generally, says Timothy Matovina, a professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. But, he adds, “They will have an even greater affection for the pope in this instance.”

“Demographics are south of the equator, not north anymore,” says Mr. Matovina. “This choice resonates with where church growth is happening.”

[LINK] “Homegrown pope wouldn’t have revived Quebec Catholicism, experts say”

I posted recently about the possibilities of Québec City Cardinal Marc Ouellet being elected to the office of the papacy. He wasn’t elected, as it happened, not least because he doesn’t seem to have wanted to become Pope. (His history of controversial conservative rhetoric wasn’t a factor.) René Bruemmer’s Montreal Gazette article makes the point that, even if Ouellet was elected Pope, the shift in Québec towards secular values–at least values different from the conservative norms of Roman Catholicism Ouellet favours–has been much too significant to be bridged by contentious symbolism.

Which raised the question of whether having a hockey-loving hometown boy from La Motte become pope could have raised the fortunes of Catholicism in Quebec — a land where the number of faithful attending church dropped precipitously starting in the 1960s, yet at the same time, 6 million Quebecers still identify themselves as Catholic, baptize their children, bristle at the idea of removing the cross from the National Assembly, and say they would return to the fold, if only it reflected their beliefs.

In the opinion of many local theologians, the answer is probably not. The pendulum has swung too far toward secularization and more liberal values, while the Vatican’s stance on such issues as abortion, homosexuality, contraception, priestly celibacy, religious teaching in schools and allowing women into the priesthood remain too far out of step with the province’s mindset.

Even naming a pope from the ’hood would have made little difference in terms of putting more people back in the pews.

And if that pope had been Cardinal Ouellet, who proved a controversial figure during his tenure as archbishop of Quebec City from 2003 to 2010 for his conservative and unyielding viewpoint even in the opinion of many bishops in the province, the answer is a much more emphatic no, historians agree.

“In my opinion, I think it would be catastrophic for the Catholic Church if he were to be named pope,” Louis Rousseau, a retired professor of theology at the Université du Québec à Montréal, said on Tuesday. “The enemies of the Catholic Church should hope for that.”

[. . .] Quebec society rejected the Catholic Church’s control over politics and institutions such as schools, hospitals and trade unions. Weekly attendance at Sunday mass dropped from more than 80 per cent of Catholics in the 1960s to less than eight per cent today, (as compared with 18 per cent Canada-wide) according to some surveys, as Quebecers quietly abandoned the strict tenets of the church and its control over their lives for a more liberal society. Other shifts, like the decision to deconfessionalize schools in the late 1990s, came after years of public debate.

When Ouellet was appointed archbishop in 2003, he seemed distinctly out of step with modern Quebec society, including the province’s bishops. They had been heeding the population’s call for less church influence in the provincial institutions, much to his dismay.

[LINK} "Gay Synagogues’ Uncertain Future"

Michal Lemberger’s Tablet article, writing from a Jewish perspective, touches upon a subject I mentioned last month in connection to the Metropolitan Community Church. When non-heterosexuals is increasingly a non-issue for different religious denominations, what do the denominations that were founded in an era of greater homophobia for specifically non-heterosexual demographics do?

New York’s Congregation Beit Simchat Torah made news recently when it announced the purchase of a three-level space in a landmark tower on the west side of Manhattan. When construction is complete, the building in the Garment District will house CBST’s first permanent home in its 40-year history.

“We’ve been in a rental space that’s hard to find and reflects what the community was in the ’70s,” said Sharon Kleinbaum, senior rabbi at CBST—the country’s largest LGBT-founded synagogue, with over 1,100 adult members, up from about 650 just five years ago. “Now it will be part of the fabric of the city, out on the street, not hidden away. Without an address, it’s hard to be a firm presence, and that’s what we want to become. We want to say that we are a vibrant part of the life of New York City and the world.”

[. . .]

LGBT congregations have finally come into their own, providing a home for the Jewish community’s LGBT members and their friends and families in cities both large and small. But the increasing acceptance around gay issues in mainstream synagogues, from Reconstructionist to Reform to Conservative, and even on the fringes of Modern Orthodoxy, means that these synagogues are no longer the only option for LGBT Jews. So, the lines that once seemed so clear have begun to blur: LGBT synagogues in places like Cleveland and Atlanta are merging or outgrowing their original designation and drawing a more diverse membership, even as mainstream congregations sign up new gay members and become more diverse.

According to Jay Michaelson, founder of Nehirim, an organization dedicated to LGBT spirituality, “There are some people for whom living their Jewish identity is linked to their queer identity, but for others, 2013 isn’t 1983. Most synagogues, outside of the Orthodox world, are welcoming, or at least won’t slam the door in their faces. The LGBT synagogues that used to be the default option for gay people no longer are.”

The future for LGBT synagogues, therefore, is unclear. Have they achieved the goals that led to their establishment in the first place—and if so, have they already outlived their purpose, now that mainstream synagogues have become more welcoming? Where will these synagogues be in another 40 years?