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Religious Kids Are More Selfish: The Stickers Don’t Lie

By Michael Schulson

…e studies in the literature.” In other words, things like the sticker test are comparable to other discipline-approved tools that we have to plumb the dynamics of human kindness. In all fairness, social science is hard. Developing a metric for altruism is tricky work, and you have to start somewhere. In this sense, the sticker test probably isn’t a bad tool. The question is how far you’re willing to generalize about the qualities of billions of pe…

Amway, Religious Right Pyramid Scheme, Returns to the Motherland

By Bill Berkowitz

…Dream, while bilking thousands of ordinary American dreamers out of their hard-earned life savings. The wealth of the founders has supported the nearly 30+ year conservative makeover of American society through millions of dollars in donations to the creation and development of right-wing institutions and causes. ++++++++++ Rethinking Redemption: The Case of Charles Colson In 1990, the author/essayist Tarik Ali wrote a novel titled Redemption; Nin…

“I Had No Intention to Write Atheistically”: Darwin, God, and the 2500-Year History of the Debate

By Edward J. Larson

…ry Messenger, his first public comment on Copernicanism and the first popular argument for the revolutionary concept that the earth goes around the sun (rather than vice versa). In the two centuries between these two events, science had contributed to the rise of a rational humanist perspective largely eclipsed in the Western world since the gradual decline of ancient Greek natural philosophy over 1000 years earlier. In the popular Western mind, G…

Comparing Gender Transition and Surrogacy to War and Human Trafficking, Vatican’s ‘Dignitas Infinita’ is an Intellectually Embarrassing and Harmful Mess

By Mary E. Hunt

…hat strangely gets tacked onto the end of the list of problems here. There are few earlier church pronouncements on it because of the newness of the phenomenon. And there’s relatively little emotional baggage yet on AI and the like, though the Vatican is beginning to get involved in the conversation. However, in this attempt, the reflexive nay-saying comes across as formulaic rather than well thought out in the face of a world revolutionized by di…

Is Liberalism Islamic?: An Interview with Mustafa Akyol

By Haroon Moghul

…lamic law and culture can be reformed. And I am saying all these within a particularly Turkish outlook, as I explain the little known history of “Muslim liberalism” that emerged in the late Ottoman Empire and modern-day Turkey. Who did you write this for? I wrote this for both Muslims and non-Muslims who believe that Islam and liberal democracy are fundamentally incompatible. Obviously, I disagree with them. I rather want to show them that a genui…

Beloved Immortals: Science, Miracles and ‘Jellyfish Time’

By Beatrice Marovich

…he cells that our skin, bones, or blood need to help us recover from the wear and tear of everyday life. As creatures comprised of mortal cells, we too eventually terminate. The original, great icon of biological immortality is arguably the cancer cell. This was the first organism that, scientists realized, was not subject to the “Hayflick limit” that makes our human cells mortal. The cancer cell (as long as it’s not killed by some external form o…

Catholic Citizenship: Massimo Faggioli on the Role of Public Theologians Today

By Kaya Oakes

…on of priests. We hear about bishops and priests when they screw up, but hear little about seminaries. I’m afraid there’s something going on there that’s very alarming because [seminaries] have changed little with Francis. So clericalism is part of the emergency today and has consequences for priests, lay Catholics and non-Catholics. Part of this is the red line going through the whole book that one of the most serious temptations of the church to…

The Most Forgotten Queer Folks in the US are Fighting Back Against a Powerful — and Publicly Funded — Group That Discriminates With Impunity

By Chrissy Stroop

…zer. Reached for comment, Green noted that transgender students in particular are facing a crackdown at the moment, citing threats of expulsion and retaliation in the area of student employment. Green’s undergraduate degree, along with much of their early organizing experience, comes from Azusa Pacific University, a Los Angeles County, California-based nondenominational evangelical school (and CCCU member) that is among the institutions named in R…

Why I Fear The Post-Trayvon Martin Sermon

By Elizabeth Drescher

…l do something to change the world we live in? The question strikes me in particular this morning, this Sunday morning, as I contemplate dragging myself to the almost all white, suburban church I attend. Will anything change—will anything even nod in the direction of change let alone press toward any sort of action (and what would that be?) that might invite change—during “the most segregated hour of the week,” as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famou…

O(Pinn)ion: God’s Little Soldiers: Procreation as a Weapon

By Anthony B. Pinn

…neration of Christians maps its relationship to scripture in light of the particular challenges of that historical moment. Around the late 1980s, appeal to scripture as the source of life strategies took a particularly strong turn toward biological spirituality through what has become known as the “Quiverfull Movement.” Centering around 1989’s A Full Quiver, a book by Rick and Jan Hess, this movement seeks to understand proper family structure and…