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Creationism and Global Warming Denial: Anti-Science’s Kissing Cousins?

By Lauri Lebo

…idea.” A peer-reviewed study by the University of Illinois at Chicago from January 2009 of US-based scientists showed that of scientists most specialized and knowledgeable with regard to climate change (those who listed climate science as their area of expertise, and who also have published more than 50 percent of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change) 96.2 percent answered ‘risen’ to the question, “When compared with…

Training God’s Rottweiler: Catholic Church Sexual Abuse Must End

By Anthea Butler

…in a web of his own making. The Silence is Deafening I have wrestled since January about how to track and write this story for RD, in part because I am so profoundly disgusted with the Roman Catholic Church. I’ve started a few stories and stopped, in part because of the pace at which all of this was unfolding, and in part because of my desire to get my head around this story to write it properly. As a cradle Catholic who went away and then came ba…

The Mystic in the Rye: JD Salinger’s Religious Fiction

By Louis A. Ruprecht

While Jerome David (J.D.) Salinger died more than a month ago, on January 27, it is still difficult for me to talk about him in the past tense. I expect that his books have something to do with that—the way they play with time. Yet as the accolades multiplied in the days after his demise, one thing that struck me was the almost telephoto-focus on a single novel, his 1951 classic, The Catcher in the Rye. And the most important thing to observe abo…

Na’vi and Goliath: Palestinian Protesters Dress as Avatar Underdogs

By Shalom Goldman

…ly astute New York Jewish weekly, regular columnist Jay Michaelson wrote a January 22 piece titled “Taking Avatar Seriously: Environmentalisms, Spiritual and Practical,” describing the film’s philosophy as “a bit of pantheism, a bit of nature mysticism, and a surprising dash of monotheism, as well. In other words, it’s Kabbalah.” Avatar’s Kabbalism, Michaelson concluded, is “a challenge to question what we think we know about theology, ethics, and…

How Not To Respond to Haiti

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…came intensely and horrifically violent in the 1600s, inspiring increasing numbers of European colonists to flee the Old World and to cross the Atlantic. So bad had things become that the great “rights revolutions”—beginning with the so-called Glorious Revolution in England in 1688, and culminating in the French Revolution in 1789—allied themselves to various degrees with the cause of “secular politics.” If religious conflict was destined to be so…

Monks With Guns: Discovering Buddhist Violence

By Michael Jerryson

…nd I met with Thai Buddhist monastic intellectuals. Military Monks Then in January 2004, violent attacks broke out in the southern provinces of Thailand, some of which were directed at Buddhist monks. These attacks and the numerous ones to follow shocked the country. But, since contemporary issues and my research interests seemed to be converging, I thought: what better way to study Buddhist activism than to observe Buddhist monks engaged in peace…

Sacred Real Estate: What Makes Washington’s WWII Memorial So Dreadful?

By Michael A. Elliott

…power of this terrain (think of the images of the Obama inauguration last January), the book might have easily been subtitled, “how sacred space is made.” Savage points out that the National Mall is essentially a twentieth-century creation that has relied on an eighteenth-century origin story—a fable that the urban planners of the nation’s capitol told about their fulfillment of the original planner of Washington, Pierre Charles L’Enfant. Through…

Suicide Bombers and the Prozac God: A Review of Dying for Heaven

By Bruce B. Lawrence

…e tactics, but radical Islamists do not own the method. —Security Studies (January–March 2007) The new danger, according to Dying for Heaven author Ariel Glucklich, is pleasure. Not everyday frolicsome pleasure, but divinely mediated or holy pleasure, the unrecognized pathology that motivates suicide bombers. The best qualities of religion, according to Glucklich—trust in a life beyond this one, invocation of a source greater than human creativity…

Racing Toward Armageddon: The Three Great Religions and the Plot to End the World: An Excerpt

By Michael J. Baigent

…ar is all to these people, and every opportunity to spread it is taken. In January 2007 fundamentalist evangelist and former presidential contender Pat Robertson told his television audience that millions of people would die that year in a huge terrorist attack on the United States. He claimed that God had personally told him this but added, rather as an afterthought, “I’m not saying necessarily nuclear, the Lord didn’t say nuclear.” Which is, of…

Transforming America’s Israel Lobby

By Dan Fleshler

…ed or witnessed abuse of Palestinians. In response, B’Tselem said that the numbers are shocking, but not surprising. The organization commends the military for initiating the survey, but states that physical and verbal abuse of Palestinians by soldiers, particularly at checkpoints, has long become routine. In spite of official condemnations, the military does not do enough to ensure accountability and to deter soldiers from engaging in such behavi…