Search for "when is the best time to get cheap airline tickets phone number 1-800-299-7264"

Why Science Needs “Neurodiversity,” Autism Included

By Andrew Aghapour

…ve. Neurotribes documents how selective, “pyramid” thinking has fostered a number of dangerous theories about autism. It tells the story of Bernard Rimland, a widely-read author who took up a comprehensive review of autism research in 1958 when his son was diagnosed with the syndrome. He was so committed to the hope of a simple cure, however, that he latched onto the theory that autism was the result of a simple glitch in a single metabolic pathwa…

Of Personhood and the Pill: What’s at Stake?

By Atlee Parks Breland

…r. In a typical cycle, two embryos are transferred, to give the mother the best chance at getting pregnant at all without risking high-order multiples. However, this isn’t an exact science. There is no way to know in advance how many eggs will fertilize, or how many embryos will develop. If a woman has more embryos than can be transferred, doctors pick the two best, and freeze the remaining embryos for later use. However, the sad fact is that abou…

Pamela Geller in Brooklyn: Free Speech, Hate Speech, and the Futility of Arguing with a Bigot

By Haroon Moghul

…llah.’ Arabic for ‘praise God.’ I turned to see who, but couldn’t twist in time. That’s what happens when you argue with a bigot. You end up looking and sounding awfully like a bigot, But you can be sure Geller heard it, and she was alarmed. I was, too. My own thinking is that this young woman, wanting so very badly to shut Geller up—and not understanding that Geller wants the negativity—simply fired back the opposite. ‘Whatever you say, I’m going…

New Resource for LDS Families with Gay Children Links Acceptance and Health

By Joanna Brooks

…er science journal. The booklet released last week has been designated as “best practices” for suicide prevention. There is a very robust (if muted) conversation among LDS families about how faith obliges them to react to gay children. All the time, I hear from gay Mormons—adults—that their families do or do not permit them to participate in family activities, or to even talk about their orientation, or to bring their partners home. What does scie…

Do We Owe Human Rights to the Christian Right?

By Austin Dacey

…and 1940s work of French Catholic personalist intellectuals and on the spread of “human dignity” in Western European constitutions, beginning with the 1937 Christian Democratic constitution of Ireland, Moyn concludes that “through this lost and misremembered transwar era, it is best to see human rights as a project of the Christian right for the most part, not the secular left.” Is the advancement of human rights in the 1940s best seen as a proje…

Christianity Today counsels “patience” on Uganda’s anti-gay law

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…not counseling “patience as Ugandan leaders sort out among themselves the best way to preserve their culture’s” religious mores. No, they would be trying to quash or change this pending law. How are their current efforts to change laws in other countries that discriminate against Christians any less racist or imperialist than gays and lesbians working to save the lives of other gays and lesbians in another country? In Kazakhstan, for instance, in…

Progressive Christians: Don’t Look to the Bible For Abortion Rights Arguments — Women’s Autonomy is Not a Biblical Value

By Rhiannon Graybill and Jill Hicks-Keeton

…w the Bible is not “pro-life” or “pro babies.” Other appeals are stronger: Numbers 5 offers a biblical sanction or even “recipe” for abortion. Numbers 5 does seem to offer the clearest description of an abortion in the Hebrew Bible. As interpreters often point out, this abortion is not condemned by God, but rather condoned. And, in a detail that resonates with our present abortion reality, the abortion in Numbers 5 is caused by administering abort…

Jewish Past/Israeli Future: A Review of The Invention of the Jewish People

By Shalom Goldman

…where it was published soon after it appeared in Israel, the book became a bestseller. Sand was given the Prix Aujourd’hui—a prestigious literary prize awarded to the best nonfiction book of the year. As French history is Sand’s field, and he is thoroughly at home in French language and culture, his television and radio appearances were quite successful. But the French Jewish establishment was quite critical of the book. From Brooklyn to Jerusalem…

Conservatives, Messianic Jews, and the Jews

By Sarah Posner

…ighlights an issue that liberal American Jews have been raising for a long time, only to be dismissed by conservatives as insufficiently supportive of Israel and its evangelical allies. The uproar over Bush’s speech, says JI, “has the potential to awaken the Jewish community to the debilitating approach of Jewish leaders towards Israel-evangelical relations which continues to blindly follow the credo of ‘the evangelicals are our best friends, don’…

Top Ten Religion & Science Stories of 2009

By Lauri Lebo

…n put forth the idea that man came from monkeys, according to the New York Times. (In fact, he said we share a common ancestor.) According to the Times, “the British Council framed the conference to seek middle ground, more than to promote confrontation. While challenging a religious society to think seriously about evolution, it emphasized the possibility of reconciling a belief in divine creation with Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural s…