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Can Expelled Teach Us a Thing or Two?

By Arri Eisen

…ive dialogues among them, rather than battle rhetoric, is the way to go. Most striking to me is how much the movie tells us about the failure of American science education. Expelled can be seen, in some senses, as a product of that failure; a failure to teach science as a process that has much power but also significant limitations. If the ‘creation/intelligent design/evolution controversy’ is a window into the American soul, then that window look…

Swift-Boat Veterans of American Jewry Charge Anti-Semitism at Occupy Wall Street

By Jay Michaelson

…ganizations like AIPAC and the ADL to distance themselves from ECI. This last step should have been taken long ago. ECI, as critics point out, is no more a friend of Israel than it is a foe of Occupy Wall Street. Rather, it uses Israel (and now Occupy) as a pawn to score electoral points for Republicans. The whole organization is a ruse. It’s the Swift-Boat Veterans of American Jewry. (Oh, and incidentally: Eliot Spitzer?! Surely he was included…

Mitt Romney’s Prosperity Gospel

By Peter Laarman

…ck (Numbers 20:11); who surprises us all the time by blessing us in the least likely circumstances. Mr. President: You need to understand this. You need to work with this, but very, very carefully. Because, like it or not, the endgame in this election is going to be about which candidate does religion better, I fervently wish that Mr. Obama would say a bit more about the problem of cheap grace. Reminding us that people who work very hard for very…

Francis Visits the Church that John Paul Broke

By Patricia Miller

…ly one-quarter of Catholics attend mass every week (CARA has some of the best, most rigorous tracking of mass attendance; other surveys find higher percentages using more generous methodologies.) The number of priests and nuns has declined precipitously; from 58,000 to 38,000 for priests and from 125,000 to 50,000 for nuns. Despite a significantly larger population, there are 1,300 fewer parishes, with an average of just one priest per parish; som…

Burning Down the Temple: Religion and Irony in Black Rock City

By Sarah M. Pike

…threshold. Next step was to head for my campsite on “Liminal,” the outermost street of the semi-circular Black Rock City. For many Burners, this pilgrimage to the desert is the closest they come to participating in anything like a religious community. They prepare for it all year, gathering costumes and camp decorations, assembling sculptures, planning meals with groups of friends, and scheduling shifts as lamplighters or temple guardians. These…

What a Turn-of-the-Century Anti-Abortion and Contraception Crusader Reveals About GOP Efforts to Ban Abortion Pills by Mail

By Steven K. Green

…ve been rushing to criminalize most, if not all, access to abortion. At least 14 states have banned (or are in the process of banning) mifepristone, the abortion pill, and to prevent women from receiving it through the mail from blue states or internationally. (Many of these same states are seeking to prevent their residents from traveling to blue states to receive abortions or prescriptions.) One group that will likely be targeted, Aid Access, is…

Refusing the Monsters on Maple Street: A First-Person Commentary from the Mass Hysteria at JFK

By Marion Grau

…crowd threatened to sweep up virtually everybody in the terminal. I was first stunned, then joined others in crouching between the benches. I waited there until an official-looking man in plain clothes told us to empty the terminal. People began running in panic, dropping their belongings as they ran. We went down a staircase and waited outside for a while, before we got herded to the other side of the terminal where many were already gathered. Cl…

An Open Letter to CEO Jeff Smisek On United Airlines’ Blasphemous Safety Video

By Austin Dacey

…no moderato. From the first moments, it was obvious that the sonorous orchestral instrumentation had been replaced by the sheen of digital keyboards. By the time the music reached the third measure, I sensed the dawning of something even more hideous. The melody disappeared entirely to make way for the announcer’s voiceover—“Please make sure your phone and all electronics are switched off and stowed”—as a single chord hovered to a simple four-beat…

Invited by Allah

By Amina Wadud

…embassy and applied for a new one, the one I have now. Here’s a tip, the fastest way to get a passport is to get one outside the US. Imagine that. But I digress… A friend of mine who lives in Madinah now once wrote a reminder on Facebook, that no one makes hajj except by invitation from Allah. When I saw that I put in my requisition, I must admit. But I also admit, I’m a bit skeptical of considering this literally. Mainly because there are three m…

Gingrich Downplays Adelson Money, Stokes Fear of “Second Holocaust” at Florida Church

By Sarah Posner

…about Islam ran high here. State Senator Alan Hays received probably the most boisterous standing ovation of the day when he was introduced as the sponsor of a bill that would ban the use of “foreign” (i.e., sharia) law. Florida religious right leaders seem to see this moment, even if Gingrich or Santorum can’t catch Romney, to build a Christian get-out-the-vote drive for the general election and beyond. Don Wildmon, the American Family Associatio…