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Creationism 3.0: Meet Intelligent Design’s Huckster

By Michael Schulson

…so unbelievably complex, it seems almost impossible, based on the rate and way in which mutations occur, that evolution alone could have gotten us to this point. Consequently, there must be a designer. That’s the argument. Here’s the strategy: take a set of ideas that aren’t actually all that controversial; lay them out in order to fit your theory; then jump to conclusions so gradually that no one notices (maybe not even the writer) that any jump…

The Gospel Gestalt: From Joyful Noise to Whitney Houston

By Douglas Harrison

…hoir wins the competition. Thank Gawd for white people! Yet viewed another way, the movie manages, however blunderingly, something like a post-racial take on the way matters of race, class, geography, and religion get mediated through gospel music (and I’d say these even if I weren’t a lifelong fan of Dolly Parton and an adherent to the purity-in-artifice approach to the Parton aesthetic around which the film is organized). Ultimately Vi comes to…

‘Open Mosque’ in South Africa Receives Threats; ‘Blood Test’ for ‘Degeneratism’: Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…o it. It’s the ‘who am I to judge?’ pope, who doesn’t want to turn people away and instead wants to find a way to bring people in,” Mr. Thavis said. Speaking of the upcoming Synod on the family, Francis DeBernardo at New Ways Ministry has put together a bit of intelligence on the LGBT-related records of some of the bishops who will be attending: Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois, Paris: When France was debating marriage equality, he warned that the passa…

RDBook: Wifely Submission and Christian Warfare

By Kathryn Joyce

…e authority above them. “Submission has a military air,” she writes in The Way Home. “For the greater good, the soldier is subject to his commanding officer, even if he disagrees with him.” She continues: This generation is in danger of forgetting that the Christian way of life is still a war. We have strong enemies—the world, the flesh, the devil. We also have a commander in chief, Jesus Christ, who has created a winning battle strategy. Jesus is…

The Devil’s Music: How Christians Inspired, Condemned, and Embraced Rock ‘n’ Roll

By Eric C. Miller

…d the Beatles to be important agents of change. Timothy Leary, too, made a number of pretty hyperbolic statements about the Beatles ushering in a new religious sensibility—a new way of being for young people. When the four came under the tutelage of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, it confirmed the worries of many. Eventually, after a few decades of desperately fighting rock ‘n’ roll, evangelicals moved to appropriate it for themselves. What was the tur…

By the Way: James Dobson Departs the Scene

By Randall Balmer

…to predict that either Focus on the Family or the religious right will go away, but it’s very difficult to pass the mantle of charismatic leadership from one generation to the next, especially when the founder is so closely associated with the organization. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, for example, now based in Charlotte, North Carolina, and under the leadership of Franklin Graham, laid off fifty-five people just last week, about 10…

Bishops’ Attempt to Deny Communion to Biden Will Backfire Even More Spectacularly Than Opposition to Same-Sex Marriage

By Mary E. Hunt

…clueless or offensive than this letter. Nor are there many more effective ways to turn people away from the Catholic community than this kind of presumptuous, fatuous writing unless it’s the tombstones to ‘the unborn’ that some Catholic churches place on their property. A fool’s errand like opposing same sex marriage and dissing a manifestly moral Catholic president shows a willingness to take one for the team with the expectation of rich rewards…

To Let It Go and So To Find A Way: U2, (A)Live with Grief and Grace

By Cathleen Falsani

…nse: If I could, through myself, set your spirit free I’d lead your heart away, see you break, break away Into the light and to the day. To let it go and so to find away. To let it go and so find away. I’m wide awake. I’m wide awake, wide awake. I’m not sleeping. U2’s encore that night was a tribute to Mr. Sheehan, a display of photos and video of their lost captain on the huge screens he helped imagine and create. The Forum morphed into a vast Ir…

Lost and Found: Despite the Hope, Morality, and Meaning Inspired by Deconversion, Why is Respect Only For Those Who Find God?

By Robert Repino

…on mainstream, nominally secular platforms. Pundits and columnists find a way to blame deconversion for all sorts of things, and with a confidence that begs a million questions. This isn’t to say that secularization is necessarily or always a force for good. The results are still pending. But assuming that it’s bad is highly irresponsible, and something these same experts would not tolerate if the tables were turned. Chrissy Stroop has examined t…

Why We Should Stop Trying to Pigeonhole This Pope

By David R. Brockman

…le of the Bible’s internal textual contradictions? Perhaps there’s another way to look at it. What if the Bible’s unresolved tension between the individual and the collective is a creative tension? The text, read in this way, challenges us to respect and to foster both the dignity of the individual and the good of the community. I have called this creative tension prophetic relationality. Prophets such as Amos or Jesus are unmistakably individuals…