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Dear Scientists: Please Stop Bashing Free Will!

By John Horgan

…stence of God a lot lately. As a lapsed Catholic turned agnostic and scientific materialist, I applaud this trend. But I am disturbed that some atheistic scientists are also questioning the existence of free will. “It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law,” the physicist Stephen Hawking writes in The Grand Design, his latest bestseller, co-written with Leonard Mlodinow, “so it seems that we are…

Facebook: Internet Highway to Hell

By Anthea Butler

The Rev. Cedric A. Miller, Senior pastor at Living Word Christian Fellowship Church in Neptune NJ, has instructed his married church leaders to get off of Facebook by this coming Sunday. Citing too many counseling sessions about marriage problems and infidelity, Rev Miller refers to many members “Christless past” as causing issues in their marriages as they peruse Facebook’s greener pastures. Miller’s admonition may be surprising to some (he clai…

Ricky Gervais: Why I’m an Atheist

By Lauri Lebo

…. More than pop stars. More than footballers. More than God. God was by definition omnipotent and perfect. Jesus was a man. He had to work at it. He had temptation but defeated sin. He had integrity and courage. But He was my hero because He was kind. And He was kind to everyone. He didn’t bow to peer pressure or tyranny or cruelty. He didn’t care who you were. He loved you. What a guy. I wanted to be just like Him. One day when I was about 8 year…

Lessons Learned this Ramadan

By Amina Wadud

…eded to push my intentions up a notch and make the hajj. There was not sufficient time to do it for last hajj season, but I always felt you should make your intentions the year before and then see what happens. After I made my intentions, a friend said, you cannot go for hajj unless you are invited by Allah. Well, some people might think that’s kinda quirky, but it really changed my perspective on the whole: make-my-intentions-thing. It’s like the…

Pope Invites his Flock to Join Facebook: Is the Digital Reformation Here?

By Elizabeth Drescher

I was already having a digital-doo-dah social media day when I learned via Twitter that the Vatican had issued a new encyclical from Pope Benedict XVI, “Truth, Proclamation and the Authenticity of Life in the Digital Age.” The tweet from @philritchie, sometimes drummer and Canon of Chelmsford Cathedral in rural Essex, arrived while I was mulling over a question Parker Palmer had posted just a bit earlier on his Facebook page about the relationshi…

Looking For Answers at the Oscars: A Guide to This Year’s Contenders

By S. Brent Rodriguez Plate

…we come from? Where are we going? And, most potently, Who am I? Where tradition turned for answers to vision quests and pilgrimages, to rituals and sacred writings, our modern mass-mediated age offers a new text for exegesis: the movies. The films under consideration last year (the class of 2009) reflected a broad unease about the future status of Homo sapiens as a species. Humans were threatened with apocalyptic extinction (The Road, Terminator…

Mitt, the Marriotts, and Porn

By Joanna Brooks

…be phasing out in-room pay-per-view pornography over the next five years, giving up about $100 million in revenues to do so. (Lucky for them, Marriott guests will still be able to enjoy the Book of Mormon stashed in the nightstand drawer in Marriott hotel rooms, courtesy of the mega-Mormon Marriott family.) The hotel chain says that the decision is economic: in-room porn profits have tanked because the porn industry has moved on-line. But it…

Lila Rose Targets Planned Parenthood with Lies

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…he gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it[.]” (Humanae Vitae II.14) Awkward. Now, that’s not to say that all of Live Action’s employees are Catholic. They aren’t. And it’s not as though Catholic teaching hasn’t addressed scenarios in which telling the truth causes evil—the Nazis-at-the-door scenario, for example. Catholic teaching includes the doctrine of “mental reservation”: a kind of equivocation wherein someone says something whi…

“God Created You”: Bishop Supports Gay Ugandans, Defies Death Threats

By Jocelyn Edwards

…one of Kato’s supporters. It might have seemed that the last person the activist’s friends would turn to for support at the moment would be another religious leader. Especially given that the church in Uganda was at the head of the drive for the draconian anti-homosexuality bill still pending in Parliament. But 79-year-old Bishop Christopher Senyonjo, in his purple cassock and small wire-rim glasses, stood at the head of a huddle of Kato’s friends…

Pro-Gay Marriage Mormon Keeps Faith Despite Church Pressure

By Joanna Brooks

…t was scheduled for Valentine’s Day, and as she researched the legendary origins of the holiday—named for St. Valentine, who was jailed for defying a Roman imperial edict against performing marriages—Melanie could not help but recall the LDS Church’s efforts to ban same-sex marriage. In 2008, when LDS Church leaders asked members to support the Proposition 8 campaign in California, Melanie did as so many other observant Mormons: she searched her h…