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Noah, Cosmos Controversies Not About Biblical Literalism

…o Fosdick, as Christians had always done in the past when they encountered new truths. “The new knowledge and the old faith [have] to be blended in a new combination,” Fosdick argued in his famous 1922 sermon, “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”—a new combination that for Fosdick demanded a Christianity without a virgin birth or literal second coming of Christ (among other things), which, he argued, were impossible to believe in, in this new scientif…

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I Owe, Therefore I Am: Why Struggling Against the Banks is a Holy Obligation

…action in this country that Wall Street couldn’t resist inventing sketchy new products to induce consumers to sink themselves in infinite debt: ARM loans, obviously, but also still-riskier “mortgages” in which the “borrower” didn’t have to pay interest or principal. One lovely side note in Geoghegan’s account is the way in which he makes a famous movie villain—Lionel Barrymore’s Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life—look positively angelic in rel…

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Trump with back to camera stands before a frenzied crowd with raised fist.

With ‘Vermin’ Remark Trump Crosses Fully into Nazi Territory

…and England that eventually led to World War II, George Orwell reviewed a new edition of Mein Kampf in the New English Weekly (the same edition available at the Gutenberg link above). His words about Hitler—written five years before Animal Farm (1945) and nine years before Nineteen Eighty-four (1949)—are prescient for the American context today: Ever since [Hitler] came to power—till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking t…

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DADT Repeal: The New “Religious Freedom” Issue

…ares” blog post. Perhaps it was a PR move to make the Post’s controversial new hire look more moderate. Indeed the religious right is gearing up to frame DADT repeal as a “religious liberty” issue for chaplains and servicemembers. Alliance Defense Fund litigation counsel Daniel Blomberg said in a statement, “The Senate’s cave-in to pressure from activists to impose homosexual behavior on our military will place our troops’ religious liberties in u…

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Paul the Pluralist: Jesus’ Number Two Was Not a Christian

…g problem for the Protestant theology that is founded on this reading. The New Perspective emerged largely to address this issue. In contrast to the traditional interpretation, this new reading argues that Paul never meant the phrase “justification by faith” to be taken as a general theological principle about personal salvation. Rather it had to do with the relationship between Jews and Gentiles. Paul’s condemnations of “justification by works” w…

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The Visceral Vote: Obama-as-Sojourner v. McCain-as-Mythic-Hero

…political benefit from attacking cultural symbols of “the sixties.” Every new round brings new symbolic issues, however. In 2004, much media attention was focused on social issues like abortion and gay rights. In fact, though, more careful post-election studies found that the key to Bush’s success was the voters’ fear of terrorism. Yet for the many churchgoers who voted Republican because they were still seeking the spirituality of dwelling, the…

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Obama in Copenhagen: It’s the Religion, Stupid

…s central contention was that the Games would be “ambulatory,” moving to a new location every four years. They would not belong to any one city, but rather to humanity as a whole. He was also committed to including the New World in his Olympic vision (a Princeton professor was one of the original members of the Olympic Committee and Princeton athletes did especially well in Athens in 1896). So after Paris in 1900, the Games were set for North Amer…

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When Are You Dead? Science Just Made the Work of Religion a Bit More Difficult

…se in a vegetative or near-vegetative state. The families might demand the new test, and then, if there is some intentional brain activity, they might be excited or even more frustrated and upset, depending on how they interpreted the results in their own consciousnesses. As if confirming this, in my other course—this time a class of undergraduates exploring why we believe the things we do—we happened to be exploring the question of what constitut…

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Creating a Cell: Science Plays God

…but certainly it all has the potential to be at least good. Humans create new humans all the time. It’s how we nurture those new creations that matters. Here is where to spend our energy. I suppose you could argue, and it certainly has been argued, that ‘in the beginning’ God created everything as it is now, in which case when new things are created in this burgeoning field of Venter’s known as synthetic biology, you might be a bit miffed. But fa…

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Sex and the Chosen People: Be Fruitful and Multiply, Etc.

…ut sex and sexuality. In order to do this, I needed people who absolutely knew their stuff, who could bring out the big guns both in terms of Jewish text and tradition, but also in terms of innovative thinking about gender, sex, and sexuality, who could marry a number of different lenses to create something new. It’s not a strictly academic work by any means; it’s meant to be accessible to people with all sorts of (and no) Jewish backgrounds—hence…

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