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Does NIH Head Francis Collins Believe in Intelligent Design?

By Eric Reitan

…as accomplishments. Of course, Bloom might challenge the idea that theism offers the best way to account for such a standard. Maybe it can be grounded in the practical demands of reason, as Kant argued. But whatever one thinks of the merits of the argument, two things are clear. First, it’s not a design argument. Second, it’s hard to see how scientific findings about our innate moral dispositions have any bearing on it. In fact, scientific eviden…

Heterosexual Martyrs and Gay Saints: Did AIDS Coverage Clear the Way for LGBT Equality?

By Diane Winston

…called out black churches as detached from the crisis. Despite the rising number of African Americans with AIDS, black congregations offered little comfort and even less outreach to the afflicted, according to press reports. Black churches were slow to respond, reporters noted, because most believed that homosexuality was a sin. Yet were black congregations any more homophobic than white churches with similar theology? If Jerry Falwell became the…

From Organized Religion to Organizing Religion: Brian D. McLaren Wants Christians to Be Better

By Peter Laarman

…e end, is up to us in creatively seizing opportunities. I’ll keep doing my best to do so, in the company of many others. Of course I think your theological section is exactly on point, but I’m reminded of how many people I’ve known who go to church precisely because of their attraction to the idea of God as an all-powerful king with zero tolerance for sin and sinners. How to you respond, pastorally, to people who say that you are reducing God to m…

Now That ‘Serial’ is Over: 2014’s Best Podcasts about Religion

By Andrew Aghapour

…Intersections There is no clean divide between religion and the secular. A number of podcasts have covered contemporary intersections between religion, politics, and society. The Runner Up. This list’s second Peabody Award winner is On the Media, produced out of WNYC. OTM offers some of the sharpest media analysis and most sophisticated investigative journalism that you can find today. January’s “Secrecy at the Border” was initiated after OTM prod…

Let’s Get Lost: Mapping Religion in the 21st Century

By Spencer Dew

…r state, while the second, using U.S. Department of State data, charts the number of refugees arriving in each state (from October 2014-July 2015), and the third offers “a compilation of Islamic terror activity by state” pairing the names of organizations with U.S. cities (for instance, Boca Raton, Florida, is flagged for “Al Qaeda”). The source for this map’s data, the Investigative Project on Terrorism, runs a more comprehensive map on their own…

Workers Once Forced the Social Gospel Into Churches—Can It Happen Again?

By Eric C. Miller

…ments with deep suspicion and, in many cases, outright alarm. There were a number of reasons for this. Protestant ministers enjoyed close ties—social, political, financial, and more—to Chicago’s industrial elite, which predisposed them to be skeptical of trade unionism. In the turbulent 1870s and 1880s, as the rank and file, increasingly predominated by the foreign born, repeatedly took its protest to the streets, Protestant leaders called for vio…

A Reforming Tradition Struggles With Change

By Brent Hege

…onal ministers, associates in ministry, and deaconesses, and currently the number of women and men preparing for ministry in ELCA seminaries is roughly equal (Susan Candea, “Wisdom Has Blessed Us”). While there are certainly some in the ELCA who continue to oppose women’s ordination, those numbers are small and grow smaller with each passing year. The same, I suspect, will be the case for the issue of gay and lesbian ordination forty years from no…

On Pi Day, Puzzling Over the Most Famous Transcendental Number

By Ilana E. Strauss

…Physicsworld.com user asks, “What could be more mystical than an imaginary number interacting with real numbers to produce nothing?” Where infinity merges with the earth When you dig into pi, you encounter questions that are as much theological as mathematical: is there a pattern to the universe? Or is it fundamentally random? And how do we reckon with the infinite? Some people have always insisted that there must be a pattern behind pi. If only h…

Pawlenty Stars in American Civil Religion: The Movie

By Michael J. Altman

…ression, blood, and violence beneath the freedom it proclaims. Pawlenty gives us Martin Luther King Jr. but not the church bombings, police dogs, and fire hoses. He gives us a quaint picture of horses and wagons but no images of American Indian removal, Indian wars, and shrinking reservations. He gives us the fall of the Berlin Wall but not McCarthyism. It’s an ad for a book (a book that isn’t selling that well, apparently) and not a history less…

Web 8.0: The Return of the Human

By Beatrice Marovich

…ees us as a unique species—not like any other animal. He has, for example, reservations about animal rights. Too much empathy for other creatures, he alleges, can lead to “empathy inflation.” If we want to protect the rights of non-humans, we might as well torture ourselves over whether or not we have the right to kill the harmful bacteria that’s crawling around on (and in) us. The borders of the human might be “variegated and fuzzy,” Lanier says,…