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What’s the Problem With a Good Placebo?

By William Grassie

…ntly also acupuncture, work regardless of your belief system—but they work better if you believe in them. Double-Blind The history of medicine up until the last century was essentially the history of the placebo effect. Double-blind, randomized control trials are now the gold standard in medical research and have only been widely used for the last fifty-odd years. It is a research protocol that works especially well for pharmaceutical products whe…

CPAC Speaker Admires Geert Wilders

By Sarah Posner

…pointee and current Senior Fellow at an evangelical think tank focused on religious freedom. RD readers will be familiar with the Frank Gaffney vs. Suhail Khan battle, which I reported on in January. (UPDATE: I’ve uploaded a copy of the ugly flyer Hughes was passing out.) As I discuss in the piece, there was one official and explicitly Islamophobic panel at the conference, the essential premise of which was that shari’ah law is coming to America,…

Know-Nothing Christians Irate Over Obama Comments

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…why this was so: because we do not derive our foreign policy from exclusively religious or Scriptural sources. Rather we have “a set of ideals and values” enshrined in other founding documents: the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In short, President Obama assured his audience that we have nothing to fear from each other, and that we have a great deal in common. Such was the peace-making message of this…

The Blockbuster Spirituality of John Green’s “The Fault In Our Stars”

By Jodi Eichler-Levine

…when you’re sixteen, and that’s having a kid who bites it from cancer,” Hazel tells us. Green, who is now the parent of two children, told The New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot, that his own experience with anxiety has its benefits: “from a novelist’s perspective, the ability to cycle through all the possibilities and choose the worst is very helpful.” I take this quote seriously, but in other interviews and in the words of Hazel’s parents, he expresse…

Tinkering with Creation: Intelligent Design 2.0

By Lauri Lebo

…n’t answer everything. Of course, that doesn’t mean that they are not actively promoting the use of “supplemental materials” like pro-intelligent design textbooks such as Pandas and People, used in Dover, and its follow-up, The Design of Life. Evangelicals may not realize it, but such an approach is a risky strategy. It’s not just bad science, it’s bad theology. Such dichotomy forces students to choose between faith and science. After Dover’s tria…

Top Ten Religion & Science Stories of 2009

By Lauri Lebo

…he words of Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher—and those who passionately believe that good Christians need to be good custodians of the planet. Two years ago I went to Liberty University in Virginia, the home of the late Jerry Falwell and asked a lecture room full of students if they believed in the threat of global warming. Not a single hand went up. I travelled up the road to the Eastern Mennonite College at Harrisonburg and asked a simila…

Should I Scream and Shout, Should I Speak of Love?: How I Lost One Leper Messiah, and Gained Another, Part 2

By Mark Dery

…ie ceremonially retired his Ziggy Stardust persona before a crowd of true believers, a melodramatic gesture immortalized in the D.A. Pennebaker documentary Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture. Actually, it was more ritual sacrifice than retirement: Bowie sentenced Ziggy to death, partly because the leper messiah’s shock value was losing its jolt, partly because the strain of playing the Jesus of Cool, onstage and off, was beginning to tell on him….

Santorum’s War on Satan… er, on Higher Education

By Eric Reitan

…son-based thinking on every conceivable topic of human interest—including religion and religious dogma. As such, conservative Christian teachings are not immune to the academy’s critical attention. But for those who view these teachings as identical with the revealed truth of God, such critical attention will be seen as nothing but hubris; nothing but the vaunting of human pride over God’s word. Learning is, in this view, a spiritual vulnerabili…

Listening and Supporting: The Spirituality of Nurses

By Wendy Cadge

…als that might help their loved one. Many Americans draw on spiritual and religious beliefs to cope when a loved one is ill, both to try make sense of illness and to hope for recovery. Large numbers of Americans pray, and a recent survey published in the Archives of Surgery reported that close to 60% of the public and 20% of medical professionals think someone in a persistent vegetative state can be saved by a miracle. In the neonatal ICU, it was…

“Traditional” Marriage or a Break with Tradition?

By Stephanie Coontz

…nd religious history of Western marriage. It is true that Western law and religion have long held that marriage must consist of one man and one woman. But this represented a profound break with tradition. The most commonly preferred model of marriage through the ages (and the type of marriage mentioned most often in the first five books of the Old Testament) was not one-man, one-woman, but one-man, many-women: polygyny. Even where polygyny was not…