From Barbara King of the Friday Animal Blog:

When it comes to better understanding the behavior and emotions of animals, who should be the gatekeepers of knowledge? Is it scientists alone, those formally trained to observe animals in the wild or in captivity? Or should “regular people” who keenly attend to how animals act and feel also be trusted as contributors to knowledge about our fellow species on Earth?
In his new book, The Animal Manifesto, Marc Bekoff takes a bold stand on these questions. “Science,” he writes, “is catching up with what many lay observers already know from living with animals every day.” As a scientist and a person, Bekoff has spent many hours observing wolves, dogs, and other animals; he lives in Colorado in an area frequented by red foxes, mountain lions, and the occasional black bear.
Animals are sentient, feeling creatures, Bekoff says—no surprise to many of us animal people. Bekoff wrote once about the magpies he witnessed gathering around one of their own who had just died. These birds touched the dead body and flew off
to collect grass that they then laid at the corpse. Into Bekoff’s mailbox flew stories from people who had seen similar rituals in crows and ravens as well as magpies. “These stories,” he notes, “even from nonresearchers, are indeed data, and they challenge science to prove or disprove them.”
Scattered through the book are animal stories sent to Bekoff by animal lovers. I resonate with this approach. In my book Being With Animals, I report stories from my friend Nuala Galbari about her life with the injured crow Reggie. From Galbari’s stories, I learned about Reggie’s intelligence and emotion—she knows birds like I know apes—and I trust them.
What risks may accrue to admitting nonscientists into the sacred arena of data collection? Not necessarily what you might think: Bekoff, like Jane Goodall, the famed chimpanzee researcher, has no fear of anthropomorphism; when done carefully, it can aid rather than retard the understanding of animals.
Still, can everyone be a credible source? I’d have to say no. I’m often shocked when I replay videotapes of gorilla gestural interactions, only to realize that, watching them in real time, I completely missed significant movements. Through rigorous methodologies, and substantive checks and balances, science heads inexorably toward self-correction; if we are to rely on individual voices from outside science, we must find a way to fold them into that dynamic self-corrective process.
Once in a while, Bekoff goes too far himself in interpreting animal behavior. To say that Alex, the famous African gray parrot, “mastered” English surely cannot be right, and how literal should we take a passage such as this one: “Surely, a dolphin, a raven, and a human don’t look the same, move the same, or perhaps even think the same, but these differences are minor compared to what these animals share.”
These are only quibbles; I recommend The Animal Manifesto enthusiastically. Bekoff effectively urges all of us to increase our compassion footprint: We may eat less meat (or none), tell children that eating a burger means eating a cow, support only the very best zoos, and speak up for animals whenever and wherever abuse occurs.
Best of all is Bekoff’s continual optimism, his insistence that “we are wired to be good, we are wired to be kind, and we are wired to be compassionate”. When reading his chapter “Our World is not Compassionate to Animals,” a vivid log of cruelty to animals, I clung to his optimism as to a life raft. In the end, I conclude Bekoff is right: We have no choice but to believe we can turn things around.
If we gaze at animals together, and share stories, we can help animals as the result of our newfound knowledge. “Every individual action shines a light,” Bekoff notes, “whether it’s motivated by a desire to change society or simply to fix one injustice in the life of one animal.”

From Nidhal Guessoum of Irtiqa:

“Halal” normally means “Islamically permissible”; it’s an adjective that can apply to anything on which the Islamic law (Shari`ah) has some prescription. Nowadays, and especially when used in English, it refers to Islamic dietary rules, particularly the requirement that animals be slaughtered, in the name of Allah, for their meat to be lawfully consumed. In recent years, and especially with the appearance of mad-cow disease, some Muslim jurists added emphasis on the way the animals are fed.
This has not created any difficulty in traditional Muslim lands, where industrial meat production and packing is still not mechanized enough for such rules to pose problems. In the West, however, slaughtering has largely disappeared from the mainstream market, and the meat production process disturbs many people (Muslims and non-Muslims—see the enlightening but depressing documentary Food, Inc.).
This has opened up a huge area of discussion on various issues: (a) Why are Muslims required to slaughter animals to begin with? (b) What can science and technology tell us on this? (c) To what extent can the rules be relaxed a bit? (d) What roles do religion (jurisprudence), sociology (immigration), and politics (acceptance of religious vs. secular regulations) play in this?
Read the rest of this entry »

From Nathan Schneider of The Row Boat:

When I spoke with the theologian Harvey Cox a few months ago, he told me enthusiastically about his experiences with Sant’Egidio, a lay Catholic organization that he sees as representing the future of the Church and, in turn, of religion in what he calls the coming “age of spirit”:

I was over there in Rome this summer visiting those people. It was fantastic. They are all laypeople; they have no priestly leadership, though they’re approved by the Catholic Church as a lay association. They meet for prayer, for Bible study, and to share a meal. Part of their discipline is making friends with poor and lonely people in Rome. Then they spread out all over the world and help to negotiate major conflicts. I think they’re a model, and they’re not the only one.

Before talking with Cox, I had heard about Sant’Egidio’s remarkable work—I walked by their church in Lucca, Italy, countless times, for one. They have been involved in peacemaking efforts in trouble spots around the world, in addition to working with the poor closer to home. But what he said made me eager to talk with Andrea Bartoli, Sant’Egidio’s representative in the United States and a professor of conflict resolution at George Mason University. Our interview, “Religious peacemaking in a secular world,” appears today at The Immanent Frame. In his gracious way, Bartoli took some issue with Cox’s characterization that sets a grassroots lay group like Sant’Egidio in opposition with the hierarchy of the Church. After all, last December, Pope Benedict XVI dined with the poor at a Sant’Egidio house in Rome. Bartoli explains:

I admire Harvey Cox. His book The Secular City captured our attention when we were young, as did his later books that spoke about the liveliness of the spirit. But Benedict, I think, cannot be easily caricatured as a pope who is simply trying to reimpose an outdated kind of Christianity. Benedict is clearly aware that the Church doesn’t have control of the political machinery, especially through the papacy, as it once did. He also speaks about Christians as a creative minority, and Sant’Egidio exemplifies this for him. We have always been careful about being part of the Catholic Church—that is, not inventing a new church, but being an expression of a 2,000-year-old tradition. When Benedict XVI comes to eat at the soup kitchen the Community runs for the poor, he’s saying that the Church actually starts with the poor. In his encyclical Caritas and Veritas, there is a call for a global social policy that is far to the left of any progressive policy. This is something that is difficult to appreciate if you look at the world only from a U.S./Western perspective, but it’s much easier to understand if you’re in Africa, Latin America, or Asia, where the majority of the human family is. The Catholic Church, these days, is one of the most powerful forces for the representation of the poor in the world.

There is lots more about Sant’Egidio’s important work in the full interview.

From Tom Rees of Epiphenom:

Are religious people more or less anxious? The problem is not as simple as it sounds. In general, religion is supposed to make people less anxious. But, partly for this reason, the people who turn to religion are more anxious to start with. What’s more, all religions are not the same, and different aspects of religion might have different effects.
It’s a surprisingly under-researched topic, but a couple of new papers have looked into it, including this one from Northern Ireland.
The political landscape in Northern Ireland is marked by a sharp sectarian divide between Protestants and Catholics. What Chris Lewis and his colleagues found was that female Catholics were the most anxious, and they also went to church the most often. Counterintuitively, they also showed that going to church was most strongly linked to less anxiety in Catholic women!
The study looked at data from the 2001 Health and Social Wellbeing Survey. It included the 12-item General Health Questionnaire, which is the gold-standard measure of anxiety. This survey found that people in Northern Ireland tend to report more anxiety than do people living in the rest of the United Kingdom (here’s a detailed report, if you’re interested).
Lewis and his colleagues split the survey group into four: male and female, Protestant and Catholic. They found that men had lower anxiety scores than women, and Protestants had lower anxiety scores than Catholics. These effects were additive: Male Protestants were the least anxious, and female Catholics were the most anxious. The average differences were small (about 1.5 on a 36-point scale), but statistically significant.
Churchgoing habits matched this pattern exactly. Male Protestants went to church least often (every few months, on average), and female Catholics went the most often (every two weeks, on average).
Then the researchers looked at the correlation within these groups. What they found was that within each group, people who went to church more often were less anxious. Male Protestant churchgoers were less anxious than male Protestant non-churchgoers, and female Catholic churchgoers were less anxious than female Catholic non-churchgoers (although still more anxious than male Protestant non-churchgoers).
Now, the effect was pretty tiny. But what was interesting was that the strength of the effect followed the same pattern as for anxiety and churchgoing across the four groups. In other words, going to church had the biggest effect on reducing anxiety among female Catholics and the smallest effect among male Protestants.
What to make of all this?
The simplest explanation is that being female and/or Catholic in Northern Ireland is a risk factor for anxiety. As a result, many Catholic women turn to the Church, and those who do have their anxiety levels reduced.