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Can Expelled Teach Us a Thing or Two?

By Arri Eisen

…sider careers in science (the number is decreasing annually). I bet we’d have more productive conversation among students and leaders of science and religion around the many profound issues in our nation that engage both: abortion, medical care, stem cells, homosexuality, and genomic research. The battle rhetoric would fade and, more than likely, movies like Expelled wouldn’t be made in the first place. We’d be less about selling books and tickets…

Mitt Romney’s Prosperity Gospel

By Peter Laarman

…rom Heaven.” He joins this with a very effective appeal to a still-Puritanical American need to avoid indebtedness and accept austerity as the price of redemption. This is what Romney means when he refers to “big things” that need to be resolved. The biggest thing of all, for his purposes, is recovering the will and the capacity to believe. This very much includes believing that some should suffer (working people, “takers,” not plutocrats) in ord…

Swift-Boat Veterans of American Jewry Charge Anti-Semitism at Occupy Wall Street

By Jay Michaelson

…protesting against the malefactors of great wealth and their international cabals of political-financial interest. Add the word “Jewish” in there, and you’ve got world-zionist-conspiracy antisemitism, circa 1880-1945. So in a way, the couple of bigots at Zuccotti Park are just connecting the dots between Occupy’s agenda and their own. The main difference, of course, is that Occupy’s target is real, whereas the antisemite’s is a fantasy. Which is a…

Francis Visits the Church that John Paul Broke

By Patricia Miller

…e Northeast, tends to be white, tends to be older, tends to support Republican candidates, and there’s another one that has a center of gravity more in the Southwest—we now have five states that have majority Latino Catholics in those states—and that tends to be younger, and leans heavily toward Democratic presidential candidates. Will the Roman Catholic Church ever become two churches in reality? Already there are threats of a schism if progressi…

What a Turn-of-the-Century Anti-Abortion and Contraception Crusader Reveals About GOP Efforts to Ban Abortion Pills by Mail

By Steven K. Green

…items within their borders (as is already the case federally with lottery tickets). A Republican-controlled Congress could then impose a nationwide ban on the mailing of abortion pills or certain contraceptives. (Republican-controlled state legislatures have already demonstrated a willingness to enact questionable legislation for nothing more than its intimidation factor.) Which brings us back to Anthony Comstock. In 1878, the Supreme Court uphel…

Burning Down the Temple: Religion and Irony in Black Rock City

By Sarah M. Pike

…ose “Burners” who are true converts, it is a religious event on a massive scale. Casseopeia, a 28-year-old adjunct professor at a large state university told me that Burning Man is her only “religious holiday.” For true believers, mundane life pales in comparison to this annual Labor Day gathering in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Often tagged as a countercultural festival, it is not really that at all. Burners are the culture, and among its most pri…

RD News Round-Up: October 27, 2008

By Bill Berkowitz

…n, although it hasn’t reached the 50% threshold. • ‘It’s not easy’ for African-American Christians who don’t support Obama: J. Lee Grady, the editor of Charismamagazine, has written an interesting, albeit mostly anecdotal, column about the travails of African Americans that are not voting for Obama. “It’s not easy to go against the flow when it seems that the entire black community is marching in lockstep with the well-financed Obama machine,” wri…

Refusing the Monsters on Maple Street: A First-Person Commentary from the Mass Hysteria at JFK

By Marion Grau

…stic security, and counter-terrorism programming. If terrorism is geopolitical, it’s because it damages psyches as much as bodies. In emphasizing the geopolitical aspect of its “War on Terror,” has the West missed the fact that it has been colonized by a psychic terrorism—one inspired as much by the hypervigilant paranoia of homeland security and law enforcement as by any actual terrorist activity? This is the hypothesis I have grappled with after…

An Open Letter to CEO Jeff Smisek On United Airlines’ Blasphemous Safety Video

By Austin Dacey

…the hallowed halls of Western art music, smothered under a featureless musical goo and carried off to further mutilations I will not relate here. Mr. Smisek, I am not a religious person. If I can be said to adhere to any confession, it is that primordial, preliterate one that has sprung forth everywhere ever since we beings were human: the covenant of sound. You and your associates have desecrated a work of transcendent beauty and blasphemed Music…

Invited by Allah

By Amina Wadud

…tual. Nice plan. So I went to the embassy to get the visa and was denied because (as an American) I needed proof that I was Muslim. How do I prove I have been a practicing Muslim for a decade? I went to the famous al-Azhar university and secured a shahadah document in French, Arabic and English. I returned to the embassy and was told one has to be Muslim for at least six months to make hajj. So I go to the American embassy and secure an affidavit…