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NPR Gives a Free Pass to Biblical Literalists

By Peter Laarman

…t Ms. Hagerty had interviewed two clergy leaders I know and respect—Rev. Susan Russell and Rev. Graylan Hagler—along with two conservative clergypeople whom I do not know. As the five-minute piece wound down, I was about to conclude, “OK, good job,” when Hagerty ended it with this zinger: Of course, conservatives say that the best blueprint for God’s kingdom on Earth does not spring from what you read between the lines of the Bible, but what you r…

Traditional Marriage: One Man, Many Women, Some Girls, Some Slaves

By Jay Michaelson

…ay—was seen as an unnatural marriage between different species. Oh, wait a minute, I forgot the most laughable part of this whole ludicrous spectacle: that it’s a Mormon, Mitt Romney, who’s insisting that marriage has “always” been between one man and one woman. Right—except that Romney’s own great-grandfather had five wives, before the LDS church, under massive pressure and persecution, reversed its doctrine on polygamy. So, let’s see if I can to…

Violence of the Lambs: The Legacy of Anti-Choice Extremist Father Norman Weslin

By Kathryn Joyce

…re collapsing in the arms of his arresting officers.With a bouquet of microphones in his face as he sat on the ground, he rallied to ask, “Why are you arresting a priest for trying to stop the killing of a baby?” A tearful Rick Scarborough asked God to protect Weslin in jail, and the video went viral. Violence by Another Name Weslin’s lifetime example of “nonviolent” protest, the Thomas More statement read, was now being used by the United States…

Little ‘Value’ in New Harris Book

By Michael Ruse

…ything, and science can tell us whether we have it or not. Well, hang on a minute. Before we go off and celebrate in the bar that two-and-a-half thousand years of moral philosophizing can now be brought to an end, let’s ask a few questions—the sorts of questions that one might ask of a first-year undergraduate who comes up with an answer like this. First, what does “well-being” even mean? Notoriously, Jeremy Bentham argued that the old English chi…

What Get Religion Doesn’t Get About “Monk” Class

By Anthea Butler

…w she decided to construct her lede. Leaving aside the monk argument for a minute, discipline and practices are a large part of studies in religion. In our department at Penn, it happens to be an interest of several of our professors, including myself. Prof. McDaniel also taught this course at his previous institution, so he had a good sense about what happens to students through the course of the semester. The conversation we had as a department…

Conventional Wisdom: RNC/DNC Giving God a Bad Name?

By Peter Laarman

…ches.” Well, yes and no. It’s a party that gives Elizabeth Warren a microphone even as it dispatches Rahm Emanuel to make nice with the very same fat cats Warren denounces; that lurches to proclaim Jerusalem the one and only capital of Israel even when it knows how catastrophically wrongheaded this is to the cause of justice and peace in the Middle East; that is quite obviously afraid to talk candidly about grinding poverty in America for fear o…

Tragic Violence in Libya: No Excuse for Perpetrators—or for Provocateurs

By Haroon Moghul

…points to keep in mind as we try to understand how an amateurish fourteen-minute film produces such a dramatically disproportionate and wholly offensive counter-reaction. First, the storming of the US embassy in Iran was quickly hijacked by the hardline Ayatollahs who used confrontation with America as a pretext to seize control of the Iranian revolution and crush one-time revolutionary allies, such as liberals, Islamic socialists, Marxists, and…

Where are the Blessed Peacemakers?

By Elizabeth Drescher

…son of God,” or “Jesus died for our sins.” Even people who wouldn’t for a minute think of themselves as uninformed biblical literalists interpret these statements with an uncontextualized, theological flatness that would move you right to the top of the class at Liberty University. This widespread ignorance among Christians—perhaps especially those who think of themselves as more progressive in their beliefs and practices—encourages cooptation by…

Bible Publishers are People Too!

By Sarah Posner

…ciples the company is committed to following is respect for the inviolable sanctity of the life of every human being as created in the image and likeness of God from the moment of conception/fertilization (cf. Jeremiah 1:5; Genesis 1:26). Think about that for a minute: Tyndale is alleging that because it believes that Jeremiah 1:15 and Genesis 1:26 state that life begins “from the moment of conception/fertilization,” that by requiring it to cover…

Are Social Issues Non-Issues?

By Jay Michaelson

…ase and hush it up when it comes to winning over the middle. But that partisan preference doesn’t explain why the president never mentioned social or religious issues, and why Lehrer never asked about them. On the policy level, all we got, in almost two hours of tedium, was one tiny mention of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell from Obama, and one veiled reference to “religious freedom” from Romney. Insiders know that the latter is code for exempting individual…