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Religious Right Prays To Lift Curse Of Obama, Glenn Beck’s Commencement Speech, And A Cross In The Desert: The Week In Religion, Poetically

By Christopher Marchsteiner

…g students to attend a concert at a Baptist church and routinely leading a class in prayer. School officials deny the claim. The Associated Press reports Pope Benedict XVI will likely apologize “for the church’s handling of clerical sexual abuse cases when he attends a meeting of the world’s clergy in June.” In Britain, a Foreign Office memo was leaked mocking the Pope’s visit in September, suggesting “Britain should mark the visit by asking the P…

How Intelligent Design Advocates Helped Shape the Christian Right’s Texas Curriculum Standards

By Lauri Lebo

…hia Dunbar, who opposes public education, has said, “the philosophy of the classroom in one generation will become the philosophy of the government in the next.” But what I found most fascinating about the piece is the explanation behind the religious right’s recent interest in the Declaration of Independence. Christian activists like David Barton (who served as a curriculum advisor to the TBOE) have been campaigning to shift the focus from the Co…

Intelligent Design Trial Celebrates Fifth Year Reunion

By Lauri Lebo

…es struck down the teaching of intelligent design in public school science class as unconstitutional, writing that it was merely revamped creationism posing as a scientific theory. For many of us who were involved in the trial (I was a reporter at the local newspaper at the time who covered it), it was a life-changing experience. As I’ve said many many times, Kitzmiller v. Dover was this bright shiny moment at a very unsettling time in our nation’…

Healed of the Sin of Religion: At Church with Sara Miles

By Lisa Webster

…lost in a parable. It can mean all kinds of things. I admired the way the book was organized. There was a suspense factor: feeding, healing, all of that made sense, but raising the dead? I kept wondering how you were going to pull that off, literarily or otherwise. Did that part make sense? Absolutely, in the way you evoked that liminal space, between life and death… It ain’t a party trick! Well, I’m not going to give it away, the way you raise t…

Capricology: Week 3: Apotheosis, Anyone?

By Salman Hameed

…our culture, which allow us to talk about contradictory expectations about class, race, gender, generation, sexuality, and especially about power. So, I wonder if we could use the news stories to help figure out what are the fault-lines in the society being constructed on Caprica. We already have hints at ethnic differences (if we can use such terms to refer to contrasting planets), religious differences, and class differences. It is interesting t…

The Next Islamists: The Wide Green Smudge That’s Changing Our World

By Haroon Moghul

…analysts discount on account of cultural smugness. Simpfendorfer’s slender book concerns itself with anecdotes, anthropology, and economics, informing us how new connections are organically emerging—in astonishing number—between rising Arabs, looking to invest massive sums of wealth in new markets, and risen China, a positive model for socially stable growth. These links involve much more than oil alone (Simpfendorfer makes much of the place of Is…

Do Atheists Borrow Religion’s Morality?

By Frank Schaeffer

…est-educated and most “civilized” ranks of a sophisticated secular medical class not too different from the academic class Singer himself belongs to. Atheists say that morality isn’t derived only from religion. I think they’re right. But they seem to have problems when deciding the limits of what is permissible under the rules of their “invented vocabulary” of morality à la Rorty and Singer. Maybe the point is that religion is derived from moralit…

RDBook: Darwin and Slavery

By Arri Eisen

…ng much more of the text to the extensive notes section in the back of the book. But, one can hardly complain of too much of a good thing. The grand sweep of the book held me in its grip by accomplishing the two great literary goals of any history: telling a good story in a new light and demonstrating how that story raises big questions that resonate in the present, back through time, and into the future. A Common Ancestor Many of us nerds knew Da…

Denying Darwin: Another Peculiar American Institution

By Lauri Lebo

…battles over religion and science. Fundamentalist Fervor According to Ron Numbers, in his book The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, the rise of Christian fundamentalism in America didn’t really start in earnest until the early 1900s. For the most part, Christians were not biblical literalists and accepted science—including the ideas that the earth was very old and that living creatures changed through time. A typic…

Worse Than Madoff: Amway Launches Domestic Revival

By Bill Berkowitz

…only with garages full of products, motivational tapes, and get-rich-quick books doing little but gathering dust. If you’ve watched any television at all since the holidays, you might have wondered why a company called Amway Global ran so many commercials. Were these ads for the same company that has, over the years, been widely accused of running a pyramid scheme, paid nearly $20 million in fines in a Canadian criminal fraud case, and whose image…