From the category archives:

Judaism

One fish two fish, Jewfish Few Fish

December 15, 2009

There was an article in the Herald about typos on Google Maps, one of which rendered Oatley Park’s Jewfish Bay as “Few Fish Bay”. I imagine it was just misreading on the part of the data enterer, but it reminded me of a friend’s complaint that she was unable to search for “Jew” on Google, [...]

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Twittorah

December 5, 2009

Rabbi Ben Greenberg has collected a number of readings from the Torah – re-tweeted by a selection of Jewish users – into a book available from internet self-publisher Lulu. Not everyone is pleased with the marriage of religion and social media, however, and Corey Hodges warned against obscuring Christianity beneath layers of entertainment, in his [...]

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Loosen my religion

November 4, 2009

With apologies to Msrs Berry, Buck, Mills and Stipe. The first story concerns the burgeoning scene of Muslim punk, which goes by the name of Taqwacore after the novel by Michael Muhammad Knight. I posted a story about this on my Facebook a few months ago (before I’d resumed blogging), but it’s doing the rounds [...]

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Religion and airport scanners

October 26, 2009

A bit of a weird round-up this time, but airport security stories have been turning up on the religion blogs lately. The first story concerns a Canadian Roman Catholic bishop who was discovered with sexual images of young children on his laptop hard-drive by airport security. Tmatt at GetReligion asked “What made them search a [...]

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Metrodoxy

September 27, 2009

Benjamin Weiner has reviewed Benyamin Cohen’s new book My Jesus Year: A Rabbi’s Son Wanders the Bible Belt in Search of His Own Faith over at ReligionDispatches. He criticises the author, an Orthodox Jew of not challenging himself enough during the year of Sundays he spent attending Christian church services, ostensibly to question his faith [...]

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‘Tweeting Wall’? ‘Twestern Wall? ‘Twailing Wall’?

July 24, 2009

T’were awful puns, I know. Twitter user @TheKotel has established a free service whereby prayers tweeted on his profile will be printed and placed in the Western or ‘Wailing’ Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem. This is by no means an ‘official’ service, and the associated website’s FAQ attributes it to “a young man [...]

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Towards a kosher internet

June 16, 2009

Orthodox Jews can now click their mouses with relief as new web portal Koogle will filter out taboo sites. The site’s name is not only an amalgamation of kosher and Google, but also the Jewish dessert kugel. The portal features Jewish news and a search engine that automatically filters out objectionable material, such as ‘immodestly [...]

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LOLcat Bible founder too squeamish to read Passion narrative in LOLspeak

April 14, 2009

Last week ABC Radio’s ‘Lingua Franca’ programme interviewed Martin Grondin, founder of the LOLcat Bible wiki. Grodin is a software engineer who served more as editor and abritrator than translator on the project. Grodin describes himself as coming from a religious background, although his faith lapsed some time ago. He still balks, however, at the [...]

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Private prayer request over school stoush viewed as “public” allegation by principal

February 13, 2009

The receptionist at a school in Devon may face dismissal for misconduct after she allegedly made claims against the school and its staff. Jennie Cain’s 5-year-old daughter was reprimanded by a teacher after she was overheard discussing Jesus and Heaven with a class-mate. She met her mother in tears after school, who subsequently approached the [...]

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Muslims for Moses?

December 7, 2008

Sorry, I couldn’t resist. I was going to call it Jews for Jihads, but the whole Jews for Jesus thing is that they’re Christians pretending to be Jews, so I had to get the relationship right. Dr. Ofer Grosbard, a lecturer in counselling at the University of Haifa has responded to requests from his Bedouin [...]

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