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Angels & Demons: America’s Preeminent Pop Theologian Takes on Religion and Science

…s unthinkable terrorism? Ostensibly it’s the fruit of a centuries-old feud between the dogmatic Vatican and a radicalized remnant of the Illuminati, the brotherhood (or, as the book calls them, the “think tank”) of benevolent scientists whom the aforementioned religion cruelly repressed, and whose actual importance Brown greatly exaggerates. All this provides an occasion for a handful of discourses on the errors of both a stultifying religion and…

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Capitalism and the Anti-Modern Pope

…But what these men understand as “Modern” is not entirely clear. Perhaps a better way to say this is that the target keeps shifting in papal polemics about Modernity. Whereas Modernism was associated with the natural sciences and Liberal theology in the early 20th century, the twinned ideologies of feminism and secularism came under increasing fire in the 1970s. These days, the culture of the Modern (and it is important to recall that this name de…

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The Gray Lady’s Regard: Ritual and the Wedding Pages

…icissitudes. If only. At its hip-swinging height, love permeates, pressing between gritted teeth and crow’s feet, between the tedium of a day and the discontents of whatever profession. Etta may be right that it’s the thrill you rest your cheek to, and St. Paul may have it when he says it endures all things. But these Weddings don’t live on love; they live on calculation. One of the wicked pleasures as a reader of the announcements is to fantasize…

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Rebuilding the Wall of Separation: A Progressive Discussion on Church & State

…something in his intuition that the metaphor of a high wall of separation between religion and secularism is past its prime. Frederick Clarkson, apparently, wants no part of it. He fears that abandoning the wall of separation will inevitably lead to conservative religious forces using government to endorse God, if not the Bible and Christianity too. He concludes that we need to hold on to a model of public space free of religious imagery. But are…

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Jennifer’s Body and Why I Like Buffy’s Body Better

…ry discourses about contraception and abortion regularly made a connection between female sexuality and demonic influence (an image in a book from the National Police Gazette shows a young woman, a scaly demon emerging from her vagina with a caption that reads “The Female Abortionist”); In the early twentieth century, silent film actress Theda Bara became the archetypal “vamp” who used sex to lure men to their deaths while Adele Farrington, in a p…

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A Jew in Church? No Big Deal

…ere he codifies into the more marketable slogan “I want Jesus to make me a better Jew.” But what does this mean? “[You] needn’t worry that I might leave Judaism,” he assures his wife (and thereby his reader) toward the beginning of his escapade. “I [have] no intention of doing any such thing.” Thus ensconced within safe parameters, he sets out on a circumscribed journey of self-discovery, like Odysseus tied to the mast so that he can hear, but not…

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GMO or No: Problematic Intersections of Religion, Biotechnology, and Food

…and distortion, it generally refers to innate intuitive ability to discern between right and wrong. Moosa argues that Muslim inability to probe scientific data relating to GMOs and to more actively engage in debates is a product of location. With many Muslim communities located in the developing world, it can be politically disadvantageous to argue with potentially life-saving technology. While science and technology are often presented as a panac…

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Top Ten Religion & Science Stories of 2009

…cal Christians in a December 10 article: The evangelical movement is split between those conservative Christians who suspect that climate change is an evil secular plot, concocted by the devil, Al Gore and “the global government crowd”—in the words of Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher—and those who passionately believe that good Christians need to be good custodians of the planet. Two years ago I went to Liberty University in Virginia, the h…

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Excerpt: The Christian Roots of Zionism

…on. … In the United States, The Fundamentals, a series of essays published between 1910 and 1915 by conservative evangelical theologians, emphasized the necessity to believe in the literal truth of scripture. This helped reify the relationship between the Jews of the present and the Israelites of old. In the view of many in the Christian West, Palestine was understood to be ‘‘empty,’’ and this emptiness should be filled by Jews, the descendants of…

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Upside Down Judaism: Why Are Progressives Studying Talmud?

…t Orthodox Jews were more interested in ritual observances—the obligations between people and God—while Reform Jews were interested in charity and justice, or the obligations among people. (No one really knew where the Conservative movement stood…) The last decade has changed all this. On the one hand there has been an unprecedented growth of Jewish social justice organizations; groups like California’s Progressive Jewish Alliance, Avodah: The Jew…

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