Scared of Gloucestershire...

Some days the news stories seem too much to bear: In the Telegraph, we have a strange piece titled: Let's get it straight: Irish child abuse was perpetrated by the trendy, modern post-Vatican II Catholic Church where the author seems to have been given space to follow his wholly unsubstantiated (to an extent we wouldn't tolerate in an essay) line that liberalising Catholic attitudes to sexuality are the main cause of the child abuse scandal.

Then we read in the Guardian: Uganda considers death sentence for gay sex in bill before parliament : Minimum penalty is life in jail, under anti-homosexuality bill; US evangelists are main activists behind measure - which tops off a pretty bad day for religon in the press...

anyone have any good news?

CNN is putting together a set of videos on this year's Hajj. The first one is below...
D.



If the video does not display above - you can go to: http://us.cnn.com/video/?/video/world/2009/11/21/mecca.streets.walk.talk.cnn

The Philosophy Society: November

After another date change, the philosophy reading group will be meeting Thursday, 12th November at Park Campus. However, we will not meet in The Gallery Room. We will have a seminar room as we had for the summer meetings. Our best bet is to meet in front of the SU Bar at 6.55pm and go from there.

This month we will be discussing "The Theses on Feuerbach" by Karl Marx. Why not also have a look at Feuerbach and Hegel (with your extra time) as Marx is responding to the philosophical armchair tendency of 'interpreting' rather than 'changing'? The link: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.pdf

If you have too much time on your hands (about two minutes), have a look at this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ovgccxfEq8&feature=related

Look forward to having a rousing discussion tomorrow evening,

Shelley

Religious Movements list

The University of Virginia has a great page at http://web.archive.org/web/20060902232910/religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/profiles/listalpha.htm giving profiles for a huge number of religious movements: be it the Amish, Falun Gong, Jesus Army, UFO cults or Zoroastrianism - they are all there...
Enjoy...

d.

Abraham and the Sacrifice of his Son in the three Abrahamic Faiths

The University is joining the Al Mahdi Institute in Birmingham in an exploration of the topic of Sacrifice in the three Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The focus is a single text: the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of his son, which is told in the Scriptures of all three faiths (Genesis 22; Sura 12) and developed in their art and literature.

Professors Melissa Raphael and Gordon McConville from the Humanities Department will consider the text from the perspective of Judaism and Christianity respectively, while Dr. Ian Williams of Al Mahdi will do so from the perspective of Islam.

The event will take place at Francis Close Hall on 16th November from 11.15 in the Chapel Side Room. All are welcome.

To register, please contact Patricia Downes, pdownes@glos.ac.uk