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Evolution Challenged in ‘Textbook’ Case: As Goes Texas, So Goes the Nation

By Lauri Lebo

…s like the Seattle-based Discovery Institute are now claiming victory “for science education.” But science watchdogs say the board actually created a road map to pressure publishers into putting false arguments into their textbooks attacking the validity of evolution. In what was a confusing and convoluted flurry of back-and-forth motions—during which science experts who had testified earlier in the week were not permitted to come back and address…

Introducing The Cubit, RD’s New Religion & Science Portal

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…Schulson is a freelance writer in Durham, N.C. He has covered religion, science, and culture for The Daily Beast, Aeon, Salon, and Religion & Politics, among others. Both Andrew and Michael have written about religion-and-science issues for RD, covering robot theology, multiverse theory, Katie Couric’s reincarnation episode, and the effects of analytic thinking on religious beliefs….

Did Pope Francis Just End the Religion and Science Conflict?

By Donovan Schaefer

…hority in priests rather than individuals. For Draper, the issue was never about a basic irreconcilability between religion and science, but what he saw as specific problems with the Roman Catholic Church, the most expansive and politically powerful Christian denomination. In fact, he explicitly endorsed Protestantism as an appropriate partner for scientific discovery and modernization. Contemporary historians of science and religion have abandone…

Did the Dalai Lama Just Call for an End to Religion?

By Richard Schiffman

…tual techniques. He has written a book on the convergence of views between Buddhism and science and he helped to organize conferences where religious thinkers meet with scientists to explore their common ground. This is because, in his view, science can help religion to fine tune its own methods. (Neurology has already gone a long way toward validating the reality of spiritual states by documenting, for example, similar changes in regions of the c…

“As Orthodox As They Come”: A Backstage Conversation With Rob Bell

By Andrew Aghapour and Michael Schulson

…his scale seems so small? A friend of mine always says, “If you’re talking about God, you’re talking about the metaphor for the mystery of the infinitely unknowable.” To me, the power of a faith tradition would be that it puts language on these deeper forces and realities. If at any moment you’re one discovery away from your story being silly? It’s like the dude at JPL [NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory] who is head of all things that we launch int…

Is Tarot Just a Cool Self-Help Deck of Cards?

By Daniel Wise

…ere religion.” These Western colonial thinkers created the image of a pure Buddhism that fit the standards of Western Protestant liberal thought, distancing Buddhism from what they perceived as unenlightened elements like appeals to various gods, colorful rituals, and the complex material culture of Buddhism in order to render it palatable and rational for Western use. We’ve seen this phenomenon most recently in the appropriation of mindfulness fo…

Christians of Color Are Rejecting “Colonial Christianity” and Reclaiming Ancestral Spiritualities

By Deborah Jian Lee

…self from her mother’s faith. As she seeks to unlearn and relearn messages about her mother’s Buddhism, she’s trying to let go of the fear that once held her back. “I just don’t want to be so afraid,” she says. The more people I spoke to, the more I realized the depth of the rift people of color felt with their own ancestral traditions. And it’s not for lack of trying. AnaYelsi Velasco-Sanchez, whose job is to address and educate others on issues…

Chatting with Myanmar’s Buddhist “Terrorist”

By Mark Juergensmeyer

…t allow the faithful to intend to be violent, since, he again reminded me, Buddhism is all about peace. Representatives of the United Nations’ Commission on Human Rights, however, have identified Wirathu as one of the main figures in Myanmar’s pattern of human rights abuse against Muslims, particularly the Rohingya who live in the northern portion of Rakhine province adjacent to Bangladesh. Though the Rohingya people claim to have lived in the reg…

Creationism v. Integrationism

By Arri Eisen

…ot we just completed, several professors and graduate students taught life sciences, neurosciences, physics, math, and science philosophy to thirty-three monks and 5 nuns. Evolution was the first life sciences topic two of my co-teachers and I decided to focus on. For my section, the monks developed an experiment to test the hypothesis, a small piece of Darwin’s pie, that the environment affects organisms’ life characteristics. We went outdoors to…

Everything You Think You Know About the Dark Ages is Wrong

By Nancy Marie Brown

…sacred object. It was a book. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic? Most books about the Dark Ages skip the science, implying medieval people had no interest in it. Books that do address medieval science are often dense and technical, written by experts for experts. They focus too closely on one subject—the history of geometry, the history of the astrolabe—failing to give the broader picture of a vibrant scientific curiosi…