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American Fever: A Tale of Romance and Pestilence

By Michael A. Elliott

…omsayers assert that their own exciting views of catastrophe are rooted in science and measurable observation.” But our survivalist is not having it. He’s skeptical of grand theories to explain the pandemic, just as he’s wary of anyone who claims to know how to combat it. In fact, one of the themes that emerges from his forays into the world of flu scholarship is how little we actually know about the way that viruses work. Outbreak narratives typi…

Fundamentalist Purity Purges

By Randall Balmer

…the substance of Waltke’s argument, I’ve never understood why all the fuss about the Genesis account(s) of creation. The first couple of chapters of Genesis purport to be neither history nor science. Yet evangelical and fundamentalist literalists insist on interpreting them as such. The purpose—and the beauty!—of the first two chapters of Genesis, it seems to me, is that these creation narratives tell us something important about the character of…

Religion Reporting as Therapy? Praying for Help with Budget Crisis…

By Michael J. Altman

…t? While our own Sarah Posner’s conversation with Mollie Ziegler Hemingway about religion and politics was featured on the NYTimes.com site, others argue that journalism has replaced religion as the source of public morality. Or does religion reporting serve as public therapy? Offering a pularistic balm to the wounds of religious difference. At the Guardian, they wonder if inmates should get religion in prison and the American Association for the…

Web 8.0: The Return of the Human

By Beatrice Marovich

…nique species—not like any other animal. He has, for example, reservations about animal rights. Too much empathy for other creatures, he alleges, can lead to “empathy inflation.” If we want to protect the rights of non-humans, we might as well torture ourselves over whether or not we have the right to kill the harmful bacteria that’s crawling around on (and in) us. The borders of the human might be “variegated and fuzzy,” Lanier says, but that doe…

Were You Born Selfish?: An Interview with Frans de Waal

By Benjamin Hale

…original sin: we are born selfish. It’s not in agreement with what we know about human biology, and it’s not in agreement with what we know about animal biology, either. It assumes the only thing individual humans or animals care about are their own selfish benefits. There’s nothing wrong with saying that empathy evolved for reasons to serve yourself, or that cooperation evolved in the end to serve yourself. But that needs to be distinguished from…

More Americans Support than Oppose Same-Sex Marriage for First Time

By Sarah Posner

…he National Election Surveys, and I don’t think they ever asked a question about that (or if they did it was only in the 2008 version). I can’t stress this enough. In other words, the GSS is the only survey that shows these trends over time, using face-to-face surveys of respondents (as opposed to telephone polls). Sherkat performed the analysis on the GSS data following the publication of his 2010 paper, “Religion, politics, and support for same-…

The End (of Religion) is Near, Scientists Say

By Louis A. Ruprecht

Scientists often have a funny way of talking about religion. A case in point concerns a new study that was discussed at the American Physical Society meetings in Dallas, Texas, late last month. Religion, it seems, is going extinct. You heard me: extinct. Dead and gone. Like the dinosaurs. The data that a team of mathematicians used to reach this rather surprising conclusion were census reports of religious affiliation. Using a complicated means o…

The Garden of Eden: A Dull Place? Paradise Lust Author Explains…

By Nathan Schneider

…narrative in Genesis, say, Eden has played a role in recent public debates about religion, science, and politics. It never got a Scopes Monkey Trial—though it was certainly discussed in Scopes. Are we overdue for a major public debate about Eden? Or is it too rarefied a concern, somehow? Brook Wilensky-Lanford: Christianity Today recently tried to ignite a major debate about whether there was a “real Adam,” that is, one original pair of primate an…

‘Reasons My Son is Crying’ and the Suffering of Children

By Jodi Eichler-Levine

…s—has caught the eye of so many people. In an interview with the Christian Science Monitor, Greg Pembroke, the father behind the post, explained that he was inspired by the ambitious, gorgeous photography of Brandon Stanton’s Humans of New York project which chronicles the denizens of New York City in all of their diverse, vivid, daily glory. In other words, Pembroke wasn’t out to create a maudlin page of woe. He was out to chronicle the quotidian…

If Apes Could Talk to Atheists

By Beatrice Marovich

…ebates about religion in the contemporary U.S. are still rooted in debates about belief. Prominent public atheists like Richard Dawkins speak about religion as though it’s something we need to understand rationally. How would these public debates change if we were to start thinking about the animal edges of religious life—the ways in which religious life has more to do with so-called animal instinct than we’ve often imagined? This is, precisely, w…