Religion Dispatches
…Vancouver artist developed the utterly brilliant Rap Guide to Evolution. I met him last year while he and I were on a tour in the U.K. in celebration of the 200th Birthday of Charles Darwin. Warning: Brinkman takes a pretty strong stance in the video, and it’s NSFW. Hint: His hero is Richard Dawkins….
Read More
…come a sore point, so Muslim women should avoid dressing up as nuns. All scarves, hats, caps, bandannas, robes, jackets (in summer), and suspiciously long modest tunics must be removed by all Muslim and/or Arab women prior to deplaning at Charles De Gaulle. As fluids and hair-sprays are tossed before boarding, so now must women’s unnecessary articles of clothing be removed and destroyed on entry into the fatherland. We want to see you free. Otherw…
Read More
…uller Seminary like John Wimber, founder of the Vineyard denomination, and Charles Kraft, missiologist. He was good friends with the now-deceased Wimber. Wagner’s empire began to grow after he left the seminary in the early ’90s to establish a ministry in Colorado Springs. The NAR, according to Wagner, began in 2001, prompting him to call the 21st century the beginning of the “Second Apostolic Age.” Those in the NAR believe that in order to bring…
Read More
…eadership team” during the period Chavez was coming under the influence of Charles Dederich, founder of Synanon (“a Los Angeles-based drug treatment program that had evolved into a cult and had declared itself a ‘religion’ a few years earlier”). Chavez compelled his top leaders and organizers to participate in Synanon’s fiercely confrontational encounter group technique he called “the game.” Ganz describes it as “an intensely political kind of gro…
Read More
…nvolved in politics. Today’s leading anti-gay activists, Obama-haters like Charles Colson and Dobson, publications like World Magazine, and others like the late Jerry Falwell got into far-right evangelical-inspired politics because of Dad’s theology of “taking back” America for Jesus. (I describe this series of events at greater length here.) Without people like Dobson—remember his paranoid lie-filled “letter” warning his followers about an Obama…
Read More…mittee, leading several, including both of New York’s Democratic Senators, Charles Schumer and Kristin Gillibrand, to back out. The comments of Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, that J Street could “impair Israel’s interests,” followed by his refusal to attend the conference, fueled conservatives’ fire. Their zeal for tallying slights against J Street wasn’t tempered by Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni’s polite RSVP to J…
Read More
Charles Darwin wrote in Descent of Man, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” But this article is not about that book, even though it is about that sentence. Rather, today marks the day, 150 years ago, that Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published, a book that revolutionized how we view the world. Darwin’s theory of natural selection as an explanation of evolutionary processes is the foundation of all of modern…
Read More
…told about their fulfillment of the original planner of Washington, Pierre Charles L’Enfant. Throughout the twentieth century, the architects and guardians of the Mall repeatedly claimed that they were restoring the Mall to L’Enfant’s original vision after a century of neglect. As compelling as this story might have been, Savage explains, it was hardly true. For starters, L’Enfant had no plans to extend the Mall westward beyond the current site of…
Read More…gay marriage ban — voters who presumably pulled the lever for Bush in big numbers. (Although we haven’t heard much politicking from Parsley lately, one of his big cheerleaders at the time was the now seemingly omnipresent Bishop Harry Jackson.) Parsley appeared to Republicans to be a big enough draw that John McCain sought his support during the 2008 presidential campaign. But as soon as people started paying attention to some of Parsley’s more,…
Read More
Bookended by Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday in February and the 150th anniversary of his seminal work, The Origin of Species, in November, the year-long celebration of the great naturalist’s work demonstrated that the intersection of religion and science continues to draw headlines. In some cases, the year’s events beautifully illustrated ways in which faith and reason may be embraced. On February 15, (three days after Darwin’s birthday) more th…
Read More