Digital Dharma

It is hard to know what to write, this Mother’s Day.

My mother was born in 1908. When she was buried last Saturday, there was no one in the church who had lived a single day in a world without her in it. That she is no longer here is incomprehensible — unthinkable. Our minds — mine at least — simply cannot wrap themselves around the concept. The matriarch has fallen? Not possible. And yet… Read more »

Under the church’s Code of Canon Law, the statute of limitation for clergy sex abuse of minors expires 10 years after the victim’s 18th birthday. In older cases, a bishop can ask the Vatican to bypass that rule, but Archbishop John J. Myers of Newark, N.J., said he wants to explore ways for bishops to act in such matters without asking Rome.
Ethics Daily

This is not your typical political book. It’s not written at a fever pitch, it doesn’t use a good/bad binary, and it doesn’t tout partisan policies. Instead, this timely collection addresses the less-discussed but more important questions about politics: What insight does religion have to offer politics? How can we as concerned citizens move beyond the particulars of legislation and party affiliation, and take direct action? How, amid divisive and challenging times, can personal growth and effective advocacy take place together? Wisdom Publications :: Mindful Politics : A Buddhist Guide to Making the World a Better Place : Melvin McLeod :

OSLO (Reuters) - The once-green Sahara turned to desert over thousands of years rather than in an abrupt shift as previously believed, according to a study on Thursday that may help understanding of future climate changes.

And there are now signs of a tiny shift back towards greener conditions in parts of the Sahara, apparently because of global warming, said the lead author of the report about the desert’s history published in the journal Science.

The study of ancient pollen, spores and aquatic organisms in sediments in Lake Yoa in northern Chad showed … ENN: Sahara dried out slowly, not abruptly: study

Being obese can increase the risk of Alzheimer’s Disease by as much as 80 percent, according to a study in the May issue of Obesity Reviews.

But it’s not just weight gain that poses a risk. People who are underweight also have an elevated risk of dementia, unlike people who are normal weight or overweight.

US researchers carried out a detailed review of 10 international studies published since 1995, covering just over 37,000 people, including 2,534 with various forms of dementia. Subjects were aged between 40 and 80 years when the studies started, with follow-up periods ranging from three to 36 years.

The review, which included studies from the USA, France, Finland, Sweden and Japan, also included a sophisticated meta-analysis of seven of the studies, published between 2003 and 2007 with a follow-up period of at least five years.

All kinds of dementia were included, with specific reference to Alzheimer’s Disease and to vascular dementia — where areas of the brain stop functioning because the blood vessels that supply them are damaged by conditions such as high blood pressure or heart disease.

“Our meta-analysis showed that obesity increased the relative risk of dementia, for both sexes, by an average of 42 percent when compared with normal weight” says Dr Youfa Wang, Associate Professor of International Health and Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore.

“And being underweight increased the risk by 36 percent.

“But when we looked specifically at Alzheimer’s Disease, the increased risk posed by obesity was 80 percent. The increased risk for people with vascular dementia was 73 percent.

“The risks were greater in studies where sufferers developed Alzheimer’s Disease or vascular dementia before the age of 60 or in studies with follow-up periods of more than 10 years.

“We also found that obesity was more likely to be a risk factor for women when it came to developing Alzheimer’s Disease and for men when it came to vascular dementia.”

The authors estimate that 12 percent of the dementia risk in the study population could be attributed to obesity, with this rising to just over 21 percent in patients with Alzheimer’s Disease.

It’s estimated that up to 10 percent of people aged 65 or more suffer from some form of dementia and two-thirds of those have Alzheimer’s Disease.

“There has been controversy about the links between obesity and dementia for a number of years, but previous findings have been mixed and inconclusive” says Dr Wang.

“The advantage of carrying out a meta-analysis is that it provides researchers with access to a large number of study subjects and it is possible to iron out the inconsistencies and come to overarching conclusions.

“Our detailed analysis clearly shows a U-shaped relationship between weight and dementia, with people who are obese or underweight facing a greater risk.

“We believe that our results show that reducing the prevalence of obesity is a promising strategy for preventing the progression of normal ageing into Alzheimer’s Disease.”

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — As talk swirled this morning over when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton should end her quest for the Democratic presidential nomination, her campaign chairman predicted the party would have a presumptive nominee in June and, if it’s not Clinton, she would campaign for Sen. Barack Obama.
Clinton’s campaign chairman says contest will be decided in June - Los Angeles Times

Mr. Obama is now the prohibitive favorite. Tuesday night, he took at least 94 delegates to Mrs. Clinton’s 75 and leads the former First Lady by 176 delegates in the AP tabulation. He has 1,840 of the 2,025 delegates needed to win. Mr. Obama needs only 185 – or 38% – of the 486 outstanding delegates (217 to be elected in the six remaining contests, and 269 superdelegates yet to endorse a candidate). Mrs. Clinton needs 341, or 70% of those left to be awarded.

It’s Obama, Warts and All - WSJ.com

Generally speaking, morals are basic guidelines for behavior intended to reduce suffering in living populations, and ethics are applied morals — what happens where the rubber meets the road.

Philosophers speak of “situational ethics,” i.e., ethics that vary according to the circumstances in which they may be applied. The term has come to have, in some circles, a pejorative flavor. The implication is that an ethical person is simply that, and that a good system of ethics will be applicable in all circumstances.

While that is doubtless true, the concept that ethics (and, for that matter, morals) should not be situational but rather black and white is typical of Western beliefs: sin/not sin, right or wrong, legal or illegal with no shades of gray, and these are in turn typical of the idea that all moral issues can be codified. The reality in any culture, of course, is quite different. People do as people will do.

For that reason, the idea that “situational” ethics bear some sort of stigma is, quite simply, silly.

Read more »

Safe tap water is a luxury that many people in the world do not enjoy. In many developing countries, it is not safe to drink or use the tap water. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posts health information about every country in the world, and it’s interesting to see how many countries fall under the following advice: “Drink only bottled or boiled water, or carbonated (bubbly) drinks in cans or bottles.”

Bottled water is expensive, of course, and people living at the base of the pyramid (BoP) often cannot afford it. World Resources Institute’s research in The Next 4 Billion: Market Size and Business Strategy at the Base of the Pyramid shows that low-income customers pay anywhere from eight to sixteen times more for bottled or trucked water than they would for a local, public utility (page 58). If this isn’t a BoP penalty, then I don’t know what is.

WorldChanging: Unclogging the Water and Sanitation Crisis

The progressive Christian movement isn’t simply the lefty counterpart to the higher-profile Christian right. So what exactly is it?
Faith in Action

Sigmund Freud founded psychoanalysis, a system of interpretation and therapeutic treatment of psychological disorders based on the idea of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis attributes neurosis to the barring of libidinal ideations from consciousness, and, as a means of treatment, it proposes that patients become aware of these unconscious thoughts through the free association of ideas.

Although Freud’s psychoanalytic theory has been largely discredited, he was responsible for the concept of the “unconscious mind” which is now the underpinning of many psychological schools. More…

Across the board, the number of Quakers is dwindling, to roughly
100,000 in the U.S. But if Quakerism continues to catch on among the
estimated half million pagans in the U.S., those who embrace both
traditions predict that could reverse the Quakers’ downward trend.

Still, some Quakers worry about losing their own traditions through the process of accepting new ones.

News - Current News On Beliefnet

Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism constitute the essence of the traditional Chinese culture. The relationship among the three has been marked by both contention and complementation in history, with Confucianism playing a more dominant role.
Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism

PARIS (May 4) - A Roman Catholic bishop said Sunday that the church has officially recognized that the Virgin Mary appeared to a 17th-century shepherd girl in the French Alps.

Church Confirms Virgin Mary Apparitions - AOL News

If folks believe this sort of thing, I’ve no problem with it. Mary, after all, isn’t advising her followers to go out and kill people. I can’t help but wonder, however, what evidence finally came to light after 340 years to convince the hierarchy of the apparition.

Buddhist understanding of pain and suffering is that pain is a physical sensation, and the suffering of pain is how we relate to the pain.

This takes us to teachings about attachment, or clinging.

Suffering and Clinging

This is an especially important teaching for me right now, as I will be burying my mother this weekend. Not much more than that to be said.