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Creationist-Leaning Texas Sets Textbook Agenda

By Lauri Lebo

…n the teaching of evolution. In 2008, state lawmakers passed the Louisiana Science Education Act, which specifically targets “evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning” as subjects in which educators are required to “promote critical thinking skills.” It also requires “supplemental materials” to be used alongside textbooks in public school science class. Of course, the state is an old hand at such tactics. In 1987, the U.S…

Capricology: Big Ideas, Lack of Humanity

By Diane Winston

…nd Daniel attempting to manipulate her and/or her robot self, Amanda upset about…well about everything, Clarice searching for Zoe’s avatar and protecting STO students from harm, and Lacy spending most of her time trying unsuccessfully to get Zoebot to another world. BSG, I remember, was captivating because it would reshuffle the deck every few episodes, and our sympathies and loyalties challenged every few weeks. Like Henry, I admire Caprica, but…

On Zion’s Mount

By Jared Farmer

…the process I’m willing to challenge some popular notions held by Mormons about their history. But I’m not obnoxious about it. By temperament, I’m both a contrarian and a reconciliator. I don’t belittle religion. Anti-Mormonism pisses me off. In the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the US Protestant establishment vilified Utah Mormons as foreign, deviant, dangerous, violent, secretive, conspiratorial, theocratic, repressive, despot…

The Right’s Satanic-Grammy-Panic Isn’t About the Devil or Pfizer or Even Scantily-Clad Women — It’s All About the Transphobia

By Mary Rambaran-Olm

…s or scantily clad women (which no one on the Right really seems too upset about for some reason). It’s about the inability to express transphobia as viciously and irrationally as someone like Shapiro will do. The discomfort on the Right or among QAnons that makes them babble like Babel’s Tower was just erected comes from the fact that their replacement for the 80s and 90s Satanic Panic is transphobia (and CRT but we’ll leave that for another pani…

What Masterpiece Cakeshop Oral Arguments Suggest About the Future of LGBT Discrimination

By Patrick Hornbeck

…jection to providing a custom cake for Charlie Craig and David Mullins was about their conduct—that is, about their getting married to each other—rather than about who they are. Such a distinction between LGBT status and LGBT conduct is not new, but courts have tended to view it as tenuous, especially in recent years. (Incidentally, however, Waggoner maintained that Phillips could legitimately refuse to make a custom cake for an interreligious wed…

Anxiety About Homosexuality and Apocalyptic Worldview is An Old Marriage: 10 Questions for the Author of Visions of Sodom: Religion, Homoerotic Desire, and the End of the World in England

By H. G. Cocks

…give the book? I was going to call it ‘Searching for Sodom’ as it is also about how people have tried to pin down the meaning of the story. But I like the one I chose. How do you feel about the cover? I love it, Chicago did a great job. Is there a book out there you wish you had written? Which one? Why? When you publish any book there’s always the book you didn’t write, which is a better version of the one that you did write. I really admire the…

Rev. Smith Goes to Washington

By Frederick Clarkson

…subject. That discomfort is not shared by Rev. Currie who is as forthright about the principle of separation as he is about how his faith propels his efforts on behalf of the poor and the marginalized. In the run up to the 2008 elections, he devoted a Sunday sermon to how he thought Christians should think about religion and politics and separation of church and state. Now, as he faces a hot election contest himself, Religion Dispatches recently s…

I Was Wrong About Occupy

By Donna Schaper

…hey have been called the virtual demonstration, and here they were talking about old-fashioned, in-person, human interaction. Third, they talked about the increasing surveillance of most space, private or public—the self-surveillance on Facebook, the constant camera, and the ask-no-questions “security” cordons. They reminded me of one of my first posts on this whole matter: we no longer march and the police pen us for “our own good.” What nonsen…

The “Southern Cage”: How the Myth of the Redemptive Depression Keeps Blacks at the Margins

By Eric C. Miller

…uld no longer offer help began to ask for it. Religious leaders spoke less about the inadequacies of poor people and more about the inadequacies of a system that kept people poor. Alongside many other Americans, clergy began to demand that the federal government intervene to aid the suffering. I wonder if you could say a bit more about that tension between personal responsibility and systemic injustice. If conservative clergy were open to recogniz…

The Trouble With Francis: Three Things That Worry Me

By Mary E. Hunt

…for example. The turn of phrase piqued my curiosity, aroused my suspicion about what he really thinks about same-sex love. I want him and everyone else to judge love positively where and when they find it. A second critical issue raises my suspicion even higher. Auxiliary Bishop Charles Scicluna of Malta alleged that Pope Francis said that he was “shocked” by the notion of same-sex adoption as part of a move toward civil unions in Malta. He claim…