Search Results for:

VIPREG2024 1xbet today promo code Germany

Is Christianity Simply About God Entering the Uterus of a Jewish Virgin?

Just the other day, a friend forwarded me a mass-mailed promotion for Free Inquiry magazine (a publication in which, incidentally, I had an article published a couple of years ago). The brochure was emblazoned with the following warning: “If you wish to avoid spending eternity roasting in HELL, do not open and read this brochure.” Having no fear of hell, I opened it and fished for what my friend said would be inside: a note from Richard Dawkins e…

Read More

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

…leased in mid-May. Angels & Demons is the successor to 2006’s The Da Vinci Code, which its star Tom Hanks called “just a good story loaded with hooey and nonsense.” Of course, he only has to say that because it’s not true. Everybody knows that despite getting most of his facts wrong, Dan Brown is American culture’s preeminent religious thinker and, in particular, our most trusted interpreter of Catholicism. Even though the Vatican decided to play…

Read More

Texas Textbook Massacre

…Fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion over all others,” was rejected by religious conservatives. 3. The Enlightenment Ends Here: Board members voted to remove Thomas Jefferson from a world history standard about the influence of Enlightenment thinkers on political revolutions from the 1700s to today. Instead, they replaced him with theologians Thomas Aquinas and…

Read More

Capitalism and the Anti-Modern Pope

…ners both progressive and anti-Modern Catholics carry into cultural battle today. It is scarcely imaginable how, given the current impasse, North American Catholics will not re-define their relationship to Roman authority in the relatively near future. So, if Euro-America is a lost Vatican cause, then where is the Church growing? Where is its future? The answer seems relatively clear. The Church is growing in South America, in sub-Saharan Africa,…

Read More

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

…one has parents worth invoking. And every little step and turn of the talk promotes an etiquette that values open doors and natural achievement. The bride’s genealogy, for example, always precedes the groom’s. The undergraduate degree is one you “graduated from” whereas the graduate degree is one you “received.” Flourishes of detail are unnecessary (the names speak for themselves) unless they don’t. Thus, the employer of one subject is “CytImmune…

Read More

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

…ontroversy, America did not practice separation in the sense usually meant today. Since America’s public square always contained references to God and other religious images, it can be said with confidence that at least most leading figures did not see the Establishment Clause as forbidding something like the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance or prayers at government-sponsored events. That kind of high wall has never enjoyed majority s…

Read More

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

…who used sex to lure men to their deaths while Adele Farrington, in a pre-Code romp called The Devil’s Bondwoman (1916), portrayed a woman whose sexual appetites were so insatiable that she attracted Satan himself. By the 1940s, a comic book entitled Madame Satan [see image left] told a similar story to adolescents of a seductive woman who, using Satan’s supernatural power, attempted to lead men to destruction. Doesn’t the story of a high school…

Read More

A Jew in Church? No Big Deal

…r worldly peers while simultaneously beholden to an arcane and restrictive code of behavior—is actually rather compelling. “Being tugged in one direction by the secular world and in another by the religious world, they have styled their own compromise,” he says, “[and yet] they also feel an unbearable sense of loneliness and despair.” But the extent to which Cohen understands his own motivations for journeying into Christendom is unclear. “I’m hop…

Read More

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

…Plants? As Brunk and Coward are careful to point out, no religion or moral code is monolithic. Expert scholars may hold different views than lay practitioners of a particular faith. Throughout the book, lay adherents and expert interpreters alike offer perspectives on how GM foods intersect with their religious and ethical dietary traditions. Each author conducted additional focus groups among their respective discipline or tradition.  In Lyne Lét…

Read More

Top Ten Religion & Science Stories of 2009

…istian members of the Texas Board of Education inserted intelligent design code words into its science education requirements. The wording includes directing students to analyze and evaluate “sudden appearance” in the fossil record and analyze the “complexity of the cell.” The language prompted creationist and pro-intelligent design organizations like the Seattle-based Discovery Institute to claim victory “for science education,” but science educa…

Read More