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“Taking a Stand for Jesus” in the Public Schools

By Lauri Lebo

…ard, which ruled that the teaching of creationism in public school science class violated the Establishment Clause, was a test case of Louisiana’s Balanced Treatment Act.) The article includes this stunningly familiar quote from a board member: David Tate, the School Board member who brought up the matter at the board’s last meeting, said he would rather not see litigation, but added that the board gets sued on other matters. “We don’t want litiga…

Was a Teacher Disciplined for Refusing to Apologize for Teaching Science?

By Lauri Lebo

…e on the story here. It’s difficult to tell exactly what took place in the classroom and whether Hensley overstepped her boundaries in a discussion of religion. Nonetheless, this all leads me to wonder, if a student argues in class that the bible is life’s literal blueprint, facts be damned, is it wrong for a teacher, in the course of teaching science, to correct the student’s misinformed worldview? Or, in the interest of not offending the child a…

Gay Black Church: An Interview with Bishop Yvette Flunder

By Lisa Webster

…r, were taught Christianity primarily in the context of oppression, second-class Christianity. And we have a great propensity to need to have a second-class among us. When people are disempowered, they are often empowered at someone else’s expense. Whether it’s women or children or gay people. It’s always the same thing, the same thing played out with different people. And how do we break that? How do we get through that? What has to happen is tha…

Sex Miseducation: Prof Fired for Pushing Catholic ‘Natural Law’

By Janine Giordano Drake

…Catholic Thought, a collaboration of clergy and laity, has sponsored these classes for years. Classes offered at the university have existed alongside much more didactic classes in Catholic theology held at the Institute in the basement of the St. John’s Newman Center residence halls right on campus. In some respects, of course, this agreement to offer theology courses in a public university may be controversial. However, it was never funded from…

How Does an Atheist Come to Believe in God?: An Interview with Jacob Needleman

By Lisa Webster

…it. And by chance in San Francisco someone who was part of that was in my class and at first I thought, No, I’ve already tried that and I’m not interested. But he urged me to read a book. I read it. I realized there is something here after all. So that was a parallel. My personal inner work was parallel with my academic work in a way. Although I never made the connection between God and what I had studied with the Gurdjieff teaching. It was not a…

Ihram: Dressing for the King

By Amina Wadud

…e on the thighs to prevent chafing. The intention of removing all signs of class and cultural distinction while performing the hajj reiterates that each man is equal to the next man. Nice. But I hope you noticed I said man to men, and I don’t ever use the word unless explicitly male. I never use that word for human being, person, or humanity as whole. That gives people too much license whether to include women as persons or human beings, so I just…

Will Hate Crime Laws Redeem Us All?

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…otections, they certainly weren’t lobbying for religion to be removed as a class currently protected by hate crimes laws. You can bet that if anyone yelled anti-Christian slurs while assaulting or killing someone the religious right would be screaming for the maximum penalty available under their “special right” to hate crime protection. What puzzles me the most in all of this is the religious right’s insistence that they have some inalienable rig…

High Schooler says Barbara Ehrenreich’s Book Violates his Civil Rights

By Sarah Posner

…g whether the sections on Jesus’s teachings were specifically discussed in class. As a whole, though, the book isn’t about Christianity or Jesus’s political philosophy but about the economic inequities and daily struggles faced by working Americans. Could there be a more pointed aggregation of right-wing grievances about public education, religion, and the economy? I think not. For one thing, the claim that public school curricula “insult” conserv…

Our Lady of Good Hope and Excellent Behavior: Why this Apparition and Why Now?

By Lisa Bitel

…f Civitavecchia. She represents no crusades against a particular politics, class, or ethnic group. Adele was safely European, white, uneducated, and unassuming, and her Lady has not reappeared in Wisconsin. Above All, Pose No Threat At this moment, Benedict XVI is pursuing European converts and fast-tracking John Paul II for canonization. Meanwhile, the Virgin keeps descending to obscure locations in Rwanda, Korea, Australia, and across Latin Amer…

Evolution Challenged in ‘Textbook’ Case: As Goes Texas, So Goes the Nation

By Lauri Lebo

…standards that could very likely determine what your kid learns in biology class in the next decade. For more than a year, board members, led by McLeroy, a Young Earth Creationist, had been leading efforts to preserve wording in Texas’ science education standards that waters down the teaching of evolutionary theory: The student is expected to analyze, review, and critique scientific explanations, including hypotheses and theories, as to their stre…