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Why Evolution Should Be Taught in Church

…e nothing. Like I was a ghost. But it also made me feel giddy, joyful, and free. I could not take my eyes from it. Night after night, I took the Time-Life book to bed with me and I read it until I could read no more. This quiet but transformative introduction to deep time started me off on a terrific three-year-long obsession with dinosaurs and evolution and geology and astronomy. Other encounters with nature had similar effects on me: They made m…

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Two Women and a Mosque: A Convert Community Grows in Panama City

…es. Lebanese Muslims work predominately as businesspeople in the lucrative Free Trade Zone, one of the largest free trade ports in the world. In the city center, many residents are descendants of West Indian laborers on the Panama Canal throughout the twentieth century. The city has one of the highest rates of poverty in the country. Every year, a group of black Muslims in Colón hosts an event to celebrate Eid-ul-Udha, a holiday that marks the end…

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Eat, Pray, Trash: What the Critics Don’t See

…kle with divinity. Of course, this has typically been understood as a male freedom. Gilbert flips the gender assumptions—she’s the one who leaves a spouse because she needs freedom—and some find the reaction against Eat Pray Love to be rooted in that sexist legacy. Romantic views of travel don’t stop with writers, of course. Quite the contrary: within certain circles, travel has come to be viewed as a marker of a generous, open-minded, cosmopolita…

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Barack Obama, Pro-Life Hero

…g initiatives, conservative activists are finding they may apply religious freedom to any number of disparate issues. Apart from trivializing what ought to be a sacred liberal right, the widespread deployment of religious freedom arguments indicates a weak rhetorical posture. In each of the cases mentioned above, opponents of a particular piece of legislation embraced religious freedom only after other strategies failed to persuade. Such arguments…

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2012 Film Heralds Progressive Utopia, No Effort Required

…he space for everyone else.” The implication seems to be that young people today lack the initiative of their hippie predecessors who, in any case, have already done much of the work for them. Meet Me at the Wrecking Ball Pinchbeck himself was raised among a number of sixties luminaries, including Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, and Jack Kerouac. (He lived in Manhattan, where his father was a painter and his mother a Beat writer and editor.) In his…

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The ‘Common Sense’ Argument Against Marriage Equality

…r and their children.” (The infertile, asexual, post-menopausal, and child-free by choice need not apply.) Anderson echoes precisely what same-sex proponents have been saying all along with regard to children: that the desire to marry is in fact a desire to be more traditional. As Frank Bruni put it, gays and lesbians are no longer cultural rebels; “We’re aspirants to tradition, communicating shared values and asserting a fundamentally conservativ…

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Back to Basics: Feminism 101

…ce for me: Allah made me free and equal and anyone who dares to limit that freedom or curtail my equality has no right to do so. They also have no control over my choice to live that equality and justice, save for oppression. The Qur’an is pretty emphatic about that: oppression is human-made and must be human-eradicated. I reject anything and anyone who interferes with my choice and my right to live free and equal. I do so as an integral part of m…

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Obama Inaugural Address Challenges Tea Party History

…the Republic included “as he died to make men holy let us die to make men free,” when the more common version these days calls on us to “live to make men free.”  Yet even with regard to the way military force has been central to what it means to be American, the president presented a new narrative, asserting that “peace and lasting security do not mean we are in a state of perpetual war.” One of the most important ways in which the tea party and…

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Does God Hate Health Care? How About Public Schools? Or Bridges?

…or Mormon anti-state conservatism is the idea that these programs mitigate freedom of choice. Mormon theology holds that the purpose of human existence is the free exercise of human agency—the ability to choose—so that men and women can learn by experience and prepare themselves to share in the glory of God. Of course, this emphasis on agency never hindered the nineteenth-century Mormon practices of economic communitarianism. But early twentieth-c…

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Does Traditional Christian Marriage Just Mean “Not Gay”?

…a. The Hitching Post offers three venues for the wedding: a chapel, mostly free of religious symbols but adorned with flowers and foliage; a “Western room,” with cowboy-boot-and-gun decor; and a “Victorian Sitting Room,” which also has flowers and foliage. The ministers will also perform weddings at ski resorts and outdoor locations. They have performed weddings on boats, on horseback, on roller coasters, and in hot air balloons. None of this seem…

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