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Can Expelled Teach Us a Thing or Two?

By Arri Eisen

…nd, Expelled argues to bring intelligent design and, by implication, other ways of thinking into the classroom. I agree, but not in the way the movie and its proponents argue. When they push to ‘teach intelligent design (or creationism or other alternatives to science),’ they mean to do so on equal footing with science. As most any scientist will tell you, this won’t work because the idea of an Intelligence or a Creator, and most similar ideas of…

Francis Visits the Church that John Paul Broke

By Patricia Miller

…this week. Pope Francis will find a church that is markedly different in a number of significant ways; so different, in fact, that it calls into question whether we can still refer to the Catholic Church in the US. When JPII made his first visit US, he found a church that was in transition but largely intact. Some 40 percent of Catholics went to mass in any given week and there were nearly 60,000 Catholic priests and 135,000 nuns, with the nation’…

Mitt Romney’s Prosperity Gospel

By Peter Laarman

…nly feared for a time that he was having the better evening because of his way with a microphone and his remarkable capacity to modulate his voice (not to mention outing himself as LDS pastor and bishop). But it was Billy Graham’s endorsement, splashed into our faces via an expensive full-page Sunday New York Times ad, that triggered my flat-out recognition: the 94-year-old daddy of all televangelists is laying his bony patriarchal hands upon a fe…

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

By Jay Michaelson

…mitism of ECI itself. To tug at the kishke-strings of American Jews in the way that ECI has is not only to demean and dehumanize us, but also to do violence to the memory of victims of actual antisemitism. More than anything else, I’m insulted by the ad, and offended that this organization is lying to me, my mother, and my relatives for their own political reasons—namely, defeating Barack Obama. Antisemitism is a serious, real thing. When it is us…

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

By Sarah M. Pike

…kepocalypse”: for the first time ever, the event sold out. Scalpers hawked tickets for hundreds of dollars over their purchase price and artists who had been working feverishly to finish their projects but had put off purchasing tickets were left out in the cold. It was a different scene in 1997 when I first came to Burning Man and only waited briefly at the entrance as a “Greeter” cast a cursory glance at my car. But the Greeters’ enthusiastic re…

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…

Does War Make Sense? Science and Religion on the Battlefield

By Nathan Schneider

…new regime might look like. Chaoplexic discourse involves “swarms” of “runaway processes,” “self-organizing” by way of positive feedback loops. Such a force should radically embed itself into the environment, even to the point of being inseparable from it. Bousquet and the Pentagon agree that, in certain respects, the most chaoplexic fighters are the ones that we’ve been facing since 2001. Self-organizing, embedded, runaway swarms: check, check, c…

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

By Austin Dacey

…ng of something even more hideous. The melody disappeared entirely to make way for the announcer’s voiceover—“Please make sure your phone and all electronics are switched off and stowed”—as a single chord hovered to a simple four-beat pulse in the fashion of light pop radio. Gone were the jaunty, urbane syncopations that will forever mark the arrival of the jazz idiom—and with it the bluesy sinews of the American soul—to the hallowed halls of West…

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

By Marion Grau

…I shared what I learned with those standing around me or who didn’t have a phone, compared notes with others about what they knew, and tried to calm some who were scared and close to panic. As far as I could tell, the TSA personnel and other security officials seemed know about as much as the passengers about what was happening—all around me, I sensed a complete failure of nerve. A black woman wearing a security vest crouched outside on the tarmac…

Invited by Allah

By Amina Wadud

…out this in the more optimistic form. Whom Allah invites, no one can keep away. And my Zappos shoes person recounted almost missing a plane, landing without her bags, but how she and her husband still managed to get there, because “once Allah invites you, then no one and nothing will keep you away.” So I tried to be optimistic. It didn’t help that my daughter accused me of the contrary. Or rather, she asked: aren’t you ever optimistic? I told her…