Religion Dispatches
…have been following it closely. Sinauer Associates is a small publishing house that publishes college-level science textbooks, some of which are used in high school advanced placement classes. Sinauer, along with W.H. Freeman jointly published Hillis’ Science of Biology and Molecular Systemics. President Andrew Sinauer said his company would never consider inserting anti-evolution language into a textbook to make a sale to creationists. “We simply…
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…n that was never shared. As my progeny, Karis possesses some of my genetic code. Furthermore, since we live in the same house and share daily experience, I also have contributed to her cultural DNA. Even as relatives who share so much, Karis and I must exercise patience if we are to genuinely hear, and be heard by, the other. If an abiding commitment to patience is necessary for healthy communication between blood relatives, how much more patience…
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…Various forms of the sweat ceremony were used by Indians from Canada into southern Mexico. In the south they’re called temescals and resemble a wet sauna or steam room; tribes in the American Southwest have dry sweats that feature heated rocks but no water, or a fire built inside the sweat with a smoke hole in the center of the lodge. The version that Ray and his followers used in Sedona is considered Plains style, where rocks are heated to glowi…
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…ding incident. Rather he said it was because of the Bible on his desk. Because he had refused to remove it, citing religious freedom under the First Amendment, he said he was being persecuted. Students organized a rally for him, bringing their Bibles to school in support. A Web site devoted to Freshwater’s cause is called www.bibleonthedesk.com. But Dennis said the issue was never about the Bible on the desk. And nowhere in the lawsuit’s initial c…
Read More…rican institutionalized racism evolved from slavery to segregation, people used Bible stories to ground their views on specific issues, and how the stories they used and the interpretation given those stories changed over time with the need to engage new challenges: the curse upon Cain for the murder of Abel (Genesis 4) became the justification for race-based slavery—despite the fact that there is no mention of race in the story. Later, the story…
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…n of the century White Americans were also beginning to fear Black cocaine use. Some Southern police departments went so far as to upgrade their bullet caliber from .32 to .38 in response to fears that Black men on cocaine couldn’t be stopped with anything smaller. News media promoted many of these narratives, repeating story after story after story about Black or Asian men debauching naïve White teenage girls. What emerged was a racial-religious…
Read More…, being a student of American history, an aficianado of its religions (because, after all, he also knows how dangerous Muslims are and what Jews think), an expert on the nation’s essential Christian core, and in particular someone who taught history in the American south. He launched straight to economic issues, offering his “solutions” to create jobs by drilling for offshore natural gas and modernizing the Port of Charleston for when the Panama C…
Read More…living in their parents’ basement to hint that someone could get hurt because the show hurt Muslim feelings. In response, South Park’s bosses at Comedy Central behaved like total weenies and censored the shows. And yes, it follows that if company executives were so worried about offending Muslims, shouldn’t they also be concerned with how Christians might feel about a satirical show about Jesus? Yup. On that, Perkins and I share common ground. Of…
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…uri, Tennessee, Alabama, and around the globe. They are consonant with my theology, they teach important lessons, and they help human beings in times of crisis be cognizant of the way actions have consequences. Of course, these lessons don’t apply in every case; global warming does not cause earthquakes. But they do apply in some. Extreme weather in America’s South and Midwest is yet another canary in the climate coalmine, and religious progressiv…
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…of almost exclusively white, highly educated women, employing the analogy used here to make their point. (And if you have any doubts about this, take a look at the slide show on the Roman Catholic WomenPriests webpage and count the black faces—then count the number of graduate degrees after the names of the almost exclusively white women interviewed in Pink Smoke.) As the African-American students at the black seminary I attended used to say to t…
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