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

By Lauri Lebo

…Now he says he’s merely interested in making sure students are taught the best science standards from the best science textbooks. After the “strength and weakness” wording was rejected, McLeroy launched into an impassioned speech during the recent hearings about the fossil record. He spoke of the “sudden appearance” of life forms during the 70- to 80-million-year-period known as the Cambrian Explosion and evolutionary stasis, in which life forms…

Paul Ryan Is Like Jesus, But It’s Not What You Think

By Sarah Posner

…released a video attempting to defend his views against Evangelii Gaudium. Best “who, me?” line: “Who is advocating a market without regulations, without law?” On the Eternal Word Television Network program The World Over last week, Bishop Robert Morlino, the bishop of Madison, Wisconsin, discussed a portion of Evangelii Gaudium in which the Pope writes about welfare and a “welfare mentality.” It seems fairly clear that Francis isn’t being Reagane…

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

By Eric Reitan

…o the concept of unconditional love. Unconditional love isn’t earned. It’s bestowed as a gift. But for those who’ve grown to measure their worth in terms of their accomplishments, unconditional love may be an unwanted gift. It’s this fact, for Browning, that ultimately perpetuates our alienation from God. Where God offers unconditional love, and invites participation in a community defined by such love, we want the world to be ruled by a law of “t…

The Two Faces of New Atheism

By Konstantin Petrenko

…galvanize American nonbelievers and turn atheist manifestos into national bestsellers. When President Obama acknowledged nonbelievers in his inaugural address, he recognized a group of people who had previously been invisible in American politics. Of course atheists remain a distrusted and despised minority, and it will take time for politicians to begin to acknowledge personal disbelief publicly, but for the first time, led by a group of articul…

What We Need to Understand is that Fascism is Intersectional and Erotic—’Thy Rod is Thy Gun,’ With a Hip-Thrust

By Annika Brockschmidt

…my own reporting about The Family, which nobody gave a damn about until a number of Family members started getting caught in affairs. You know, did they care [that The Family was] providing lists of communists to Suharto for the genocide? Or about total war in Somalia? I remember a producer saying to me, and I kid you not: “What’s a Somalia?” What’s a Somalia? But! Oh, he had sex with someone he wasn’t married to! Who? Tell us more! We all have t…

Purpose Driven Atheism: Secular Maharishis Seeking True Believers

By Frank Schaeffer

…bout thanksgiving, shared suffering, loss, pain, generosity, and love. The best religious people and the best secular people learn to ignore our chosen (or inherited) religions’ nastier teachings (be those found in the Bible or in the “science” of eugenics and white racial superiority) in order to preserve the spirit of our faiths, be it a faith in secular humanism, science, God or in all of the above. It’s the tediously consistent fundamentalists…

What Fundamentalist Christian Fiction Can Teach Us About Our American Crisis

By Christopher Douglas

…eed to the literary arm of this new social movement: The [New York] Times ‘best-seller’ list was misleading. Evangelical books were often outselling the Times’ best-sellers. But the paper did not bother to count sales in religious bookstores. The people hurt most weren’t evangelical authors (our books sold anyway); rather, the losers were Democratic Party leaders and other liberal readers of the ‘paper of record’ who were blindsided by subsequent…

The British (Bible) Invasion: KJV 400-Year Anniversary Rolls On

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…his). Better is his subtle tracing of the biblical lines of influence on a number of important American writers, especially Melville, whose Moby Dick also counts as the single most important work of American fiction by no less a religious and cultural critic than Cornel West. Bragg’s book is an extraordinary compendium of information, less about the creation of the KJV than about its long cultural aftermath. It thus supplements the story of the cr…

In Trump’s America, a Reminder of Our Prophetic Past

By Peter Laarman

…ice commitment grew, Merton was unflinching in critiquing his earliest and best-known work, The Seven Storey Mountain, for being so focused on the importance of contemplation as to be acquiescent in relation to social injustice. But Raboteau is at his very best in evoking Howard Thurman’s under-appreciated greatness: his distinctive and powerful nature-based mysticism, his prescience in respect to the spiritual cost of environmental degradation, h…

No Longer At Sea: Kate Bornstein Talks Scientology

By Kristin Rawls

…lock himself in the closet? Because Hubbard doesn’t think he’s the world’s best actor. We all craved his approval that way, and now that he’s dead the only way you can get his it is by doing exactly what he wrote—or what Miscavige says. What made Hubbard so compelling? He was a charmer. All you wanted from him was a smile. He was magnetic. Some people have that ability to charm people to protect themselves. He would stare into your eyes whenever y…