Religion Dispatches
…ious and sober young man, who had developed a deep and abiding respect for science. He didn’t go seeking the limelight, but neither would he shy away from standing up to attacks from religious fundamentalism. And speaking of cool science teachers, Scientific American also has an interview with Jenn Miller, one of the Dover teachers who board members tried to bully into not teaching evolution. She explains how her approach to teaching evolution has…
Read More…. I love the example he uses to make his point, which proves, at heart, he’s a Louisiana boy through and through. “The theory that Carl Weiss wasn’t Huey Long’s murderer, that’s open to debate, but science as a theory is very different. Major theories like gravity or the theory of evolution undergird entire branches of science… they are hardly unproven conjectures.”…
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…lamed for economic and social problems. Kivel explains that Western racist science was “set up to demonstrate the physical and thus the moral superiority of white, Western Christian men as represented by their bodies, and inevitably did so, even if the scientists involved had to manipulate or even fabricate the data.” However, this turn towards racism “justified” by the science of the body did not mean an abandonment of condemnation based on relig…
Read More…out invoking God, he could pretend to everyone else that he was relying on science (even though he got the science all wrong and was implying that it shouldn’t be trusted in any event). Meanwhile, Perry’s supporters are going public. After news broke of televangelist James Robison’s secret meetings with Perry and religious conservative leaders, Robison released a complete list of those leaders on his blog. Referring to his September 2010 and June…
Read More…rtly and surely, new theologies. Perhaps he is right. But I have my doubts about the “shortly and surely” part, because cause-and-effect and other human intuitions about the world have long been challenged within physics. And, with the exception of a small handful of thinkers such as John Polkinghorne, few theologians have noticed. For decades physicists have had to confront something called quantum nonlocality. Quantum nonlocality does not violat…
Read More…ing and dynamic thinker, one who is capable of reflecting theologically on science without over-interpreting it or being plain silly. How can she be so open, when many theologians are either indifferent to, or cowed by, or overawed by science? It may have something to do with the apophatic flavor of her thought. Keller, like Nicholas of Cusa whom she cites, takes God’s otherness seriously. Apophatic (or “negative”) theology is, depending on your p…
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…rs of historical accounts that suggest otherwise. Science is great. I love science. But science only gives us a layer of truth. There are other methods out there besides the scientific method that can tell us a lot about the world we live in. There is the historical method, the philosophical method, the theological method, the linguistic method. All of these methods give us a way of looking at the world. So, just because the science of supernatura…
Read More…to religious beliefs. This is hardly surprising. When one is raised to see science as the enemy of faith; when churches actively work against science education; when a literal understanding of Genesis is a requirement for faculty at major seminaries, scientific literacy suffers. It is easy to blame extreme anti-science people like Albert Mohler and Ken Ham for this problem, and some responsibility does fall on them. But I suspect more moderate lea…
Read More…part because he is tapping our existing attitudes about technology, and articulating it back to us in an attractive and amplified form. In this way Kurzweil isn’t just a religious figure, he’s also a great author of science fiction. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to crank up the AC, tell Siri to hold my calls, and watch this film on my iPad while I tweet about how silly it is to get seduced by technology. …
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…my students that when we talk about American religion, we’re also talking about politics. And when we talk about American politics, we’re also talking about race. Religion, politics and race are not unconnected and sitting in separate boxes. In A Luminous Brotherhood, we see religious practice and rhetoric make clear arguments for political equality. To be a Spiritualist in the Cercle Harmonique was to be political. Claiming equality and denying…
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