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Ben Stein’s Intelligent Design Film Fans Flames

By Arri Eisen

…e scientists need to teach and do science better, to engage the public and students more effectively. We need to engage and maintain the glee and energy around science I see regularly in elementary school kids, to show that evolution, for example, is both powerful and the best scientific explanation for change and diversity, but it’s not the only explanation; we must demonstrate the wonders and limitations of science. America is a religious countr…

Zen and the Art of the Sex Scandal

By Gary Gach

…that the Society’s former head, Eido Tai Shimano, not be allowed access to students—a strong penalty for a teacher. Once You Mention Sex, Everything Becomes Sex Like they say, it’s a long story. Here’s a quick backgrounder. The Zen Studies Society was established in 1956 to support D. T. Suzuki, one of the first Buddhist scholars to teach in the West. Ten years later, Zen monk Eido Shimano took charge and changed emphasis there from theory to prac…

Inside The King’s College

By Sarah Posner

…eemed to be ingrained into its very character,” from its “God, Money, Power” tagline to the hiring of D’Souza, which “seems to push the college’s focus ever more toward the fringes of conservatism, making it even less likely that King’s students will receive the kind of education that allows them to seriously consider a wide range of ideas.” As Fitzgerald recounts, a commenter at Patrol, a disgruntled TKC student, concluded, “Apparently, we’re sup…

Freshwater Becomes Martyr in 3…2…1…

By Lauri Lebo

…ring of John Freshwater, the Ohio middle-school science teacher who taught students in public school that homosexuality is a sin, evolution is a lie and science can’t be trusted and then burned a cross into a kid’s arm with a Tesla coil. AIG is the young earth creationist apologetics organization which is receiving state tax breaks to build a gigantic Noah’s Ark theme park in Kentucky. AIG’s defense of Freshwater, in which no mention of the cross-…

Captain America v. The Collective: Redemption in Tucson

By Christopher H. Evans

As a historian, I challenge students to relate past historical patterns to contemporary religious, political, and cultural realities. In the wake of the Tucson shootings some distinct historical themes emerged that reflect not only the deep political chasms that exist in the country, but the cavernous moral divide as well. And at the center of this divide is the way that different groups understand the concept of redemption in the aftermath of tr…

Mao, Meet Confucius: China’s Religious Revolution

By Kwok Pui-lan

…rsities and a Protestant seminary. Religion was no longer a taboo subject. Students at a Shanghai university, mostly non-Christian, saw the poster about my lecture and came to listen out of curiosity. These kinds of exchanges would have been unimaginable twenty years ago. Confucius Faces Mao In another marker of the new, more pluralistic religious landscape in China, President Hu Jintao will visit a Confucius Institute in Chicago on January 21, 2…

2012 GOP Candidate Would Reinstate DADT

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…to the Air Force Chaplain Corps College housed there we often get chaplain students attending our services. It’s part of their training to get off the base and attend church services of denominations that they may not otherwise experience. A uniformed young man showed up at one of our services recently and, as part of his assignment, interviewed me on the policies and polity of the UCC after service. Since he was asking a lot of questions, I decid…

The Constitution, the Bible and the Fundamentalist-Modernist Divide

By Julie Ingersoll

…pilgrimages. I find that discussion of American civil religion often helps students grasp the descriptive comparative categories of religion and get outside their own religious frameworks. I’m not the first to note that yesterday’s reading of the Constitution by the new Congress constituted high ritual and that the document took on a sacred status (some even called it a fetish). Yet there was another aspect that clearly dovetailed with more tradit…

Hate, An American Voter Value

By Gary Laderman

…nt energies devoted to stirring up hateful sentiment is elementary to many students and observers on the subject. In the U.S., hate is a driver constantly shaping and reshaping the religious landscape. Case in point: Just look at how hate brought the religious margins directly into the mainstream, as was recently evident with the planned Qur’an burning in North Florida. While the church itself came from the fringe, it certainly resonated throughou…

What Do We Mean By ‘Judeo-Christian’?

By Shalom Goldman

…”—which is intended, presumably, to sound more inclusive. Along with other students and scholars of Judaism I had to come to realize that this irksome and quintessentially American term had considerable political value, if not intellectual or spiritual weight. Like many members of my academic generation I had been influenced by theologian Arthur A. Cohen’s brilliant essay “The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition” (first published in Commentary i…