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Robert George’s Bogus Comparison of Herman Cain to Martha Coakley

By Sarah Posner

…incompatible with a sound understanding of religious freedom (and with the spirit, if not the letter, of the Constitution’s no-religious-tests clause). That George, considered a leading intellectual framer of religious right ideas, and in particular an alliance of evangelicals and Catholics around his framing of reproductive and LGBT rights as inimical to opponents’ “religious liberty” (as enunciated in the Manhattan Declaration) would take on Cai…

No Buddhists in Washington?

By Danny Fisher

…gs between scientists and Buddhists. In 2005, for example, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet was invited by the Stanford University School of Medicine to dialogue with a panel of distinguished neuroscientists. In short, Buddhist Americans and their work should not be overlooked. Indeed, how helpful a Buddhist representative might be on something like the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships! One hopes t…

Christianity Without the Cross

By Rosemary Ganley

…logne. Could there be a connection that one hundred years later, Pope Urban 11 launched the first crusade promising Christian warriors paradise after death? “But the death of Jesus was not a key to meaning, not an image of devotion for the Christians of the first millennium,” Parker and Brock write. “He was risen, a healer, baptized, a shepherd, a teacher, and a friend.” This book is a rock-the-foundations work. Christians have been thoroughly tau…

The Gray Lady’s Regard: Ritual and the Wedding Pages

By Kathryn Lofton

…“40 percent of the ceremonies are Jewish, only 17 percent are Episcopalian, 15 percent are Catholic, 13 percent are other Protestant, and 15 percent are non-religious or non-denominational.” Twelve years later, Jews remain in the lead, although with only 26 percent of the ceremonies. The other cohorts lost statistical heft, too, as 10 percent are Episcopalian, 16 percent are Catholic or Greek Orthodox, 21 percent are other Protestant, and another…

My Womb for His Purposes: The Perils of Unassisted Childbirth in the Quiverfull Movement

By Kathryn Joyce

…ims, based in Pentecostal Word-Faith theology, that all physical ills have spiritual origins. She taught that difficult and painful labors were potentially due to disagreements between the parents over child discipline, while perfect childbirths were the result of proper spiritual preparation. She reportedly has walked out on women in labor on receipt of a prophetic message from God that Satan was deceitfully creating the impression of a troubled…

Niebuhrian Humility and DC Punditry

By Daniel Schultz

…emselves up as dispassionate umpires rising above the partisan fray in the spirit of Niebuhrian humility, when Niebuhr himself would tell them that they were just as prone to error as anyone else. Again, I’ll leave it up to my readers to decide if this is fair to the Villagers or not. I will say that after eight years of George W. Bush’s reign of error, calls for a more technocratic form of government sound welcome. I will also say this much. Rose…

God Grows Up: Robert Wright’s Evolution of God

By Robert Wright

…n on the Web. What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic? 1) That religion, at the time of its origin back in hunter-gatherer days, had anything to do with morality. Divine sanctions against stealing, lying, etc., aren’t much needed in a hunter-gatherer village, because it’s harder to get away with these things in the first place when you live with a very small number of people. 2) That ancient Israel was monotheistic from the ge…

Why David Sometimes Wins: What We Must Learn From Cesar Chavez

By Frederick Clarkson

…ppi in 1964; and when he returned to his native Bakersfield, California, in 1965 to see for the first time, the plight of Mexican-American farm workers through “Mississippi eyes.” He soon got involved with the farm workers’ movement and over the next 16 years served in a variety of positions, including organizing director and as a member of the board (1973-1981). Getting Out of Egypt Why David Sometime Wins opens with an eye-opening history of lar…

You Are More Than Your Brain: A Revolutionary Theory of Consciousness

By John Stoehr

…just brains in vats is an indirect challenge to such sentiments. That same spirit of subversion has been behind a recent wave of books lambasting religion. Yet the ascent of thinkers like Dawkins, Dennett, and Sam Harris is just one more chapter in the history of science’s victory to becoming the ultimate arbiter of truth. For most of the past century, the humanities, and its penchant for complex theories privileging nurture over nature, directly…

Transgender and Christian: Finding Identity

By Jori Lewis

…ould be no talk of drugs or passing or surgery. Here, they would be doing “spiritual surgery” to break down those negative walls of Jericho that have kept them from recognizing themselves as spiritual beings. On a sunny summer day she held court before a small audience, including me, of exactly five. The topic was less coherent, more episodic, and loosely about the importance of metaphysics. “We take from the Bible that God is neither male or fema…