Religion Dispatches
…ative — relationships with brutal dictators like former Liberian president Charles Taylor, speaking of pacts with the devil). These are far-reaching, well-funded organizations with collective hundreds of million in assets and donations, which interact with the world’s powerful, educate the next class of policymakers and lawyers, and project a conservative evangelical interpretation of politics and world affairs around the globe. Is Pat Robertson i…
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…for doing so is that with the trait, members of the group survive better. Charles Darwin himself expressed something like this view. In The Descent of Man, he writes: There can be no doubt that a tribe including many members who, from possession in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most…
Read More…y enough, Duin’s statements come just before Darwin week, a celebration of Charles Darwin’s birthday, which falls on Saturday this year. I emailed Duin’s story to Michael Zimmerman, the founder of the Clergy Letter Project, an organization that seeks to foster greater understanding and appreciation of life’s amazing and inspiring diversity through the process of evolution. In addition to collecting signatures from religious leaders embracing scien…
Read More…and son of Family Forum founder Darrell White, had complained, “It’s like Charles Darwin and his theory is a saint. You can’t touch it.” The Louisiana Coalition for Science has comprehensive coverage of the whole brouhaha here. The battle originated with the Louisiana’s 2008 Science Education Act, a slippery state anti-evolution law that encourages teachers and school districts to teach creationism and intelligent design. The terms of the law gav…
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…unicated for rejecting hell in the late 1860s. Or it could be the story of Charles Chauncy, an eighteenth-century Boston Congregationalist who was so concerned about the potential reaction to his increasingly universalist beliefs that he first published them anonymously under the title Salvation for All Men in 1782. Clearly Bell’s universalist-leaning view isn’t new. What’s surprising isn’t his posture, it’s the recurrence of controversies over he…
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…h, and I founded the Westminster Faith Debates with former Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, to advance this very aim. We bring researchers, religious spokespeople and policy makers into dialogue. A state department which talks of “religious engagement” warms my heart. So why, as I read the manifesto, do I also feel some stirrings of unease? The first thing to set alarm bells ringing is the stated aim of “institutionalizing an official U.S. commitme…
Read More…o lose money from climate regulations, most notably industrial billionaire Charles Koch. Meanwhile, the Cornwall Alliance has been entangled with a fundraising organization that gets support from ExxonMobil, Chevron, and a family foundation linked to Gulf Oil. Religious groups can’t dictate scientific findings, but they can respond to them. Perhaps one of Heartland’s keynote speakers in Rome, Catholic British hereditary peer Christopher Monckton,…
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…3 percent indicated varying levels of disapproval. Nearly 15 percent chose numbers five or six, suggesting that they didn’t have strong feelings either way. Roughly 12 percent of the participants indicated varying levels of approval for a homosexual’s right to run for office. Of that figure, 5.2 percent strongly approve. The results are a part of the Americas Barometer survey, which is the only scientifically rigorous comparative survey that cover…
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…t, for instance, in history of science, if you take a look at the way that Charles Darwin represents evolution in his notebooks. And then maybe 30 or 40 years later, you have this representation by Ernst Haeckel: he draws evolution like a tree that grows up in the air, and you have man at the top of the tree. So it’s this teleological process, instead of this natural thing. There are lots of difficulties with understanding evolutionary theory and…
Read More…r this year, prosecutors in the war crime trial of former Liberian warlord Charles Taylor alleged that the televangelist had lobbied the Bush White House on his behalf in exchange for lucrative gold mining contracts—a claim Robertson denied. And in the late 1990s, Robertson was forced to reimburse his Operation Blessing charity after his pilots divulged that its planes were being used to support Robertson’s personal diamond mining business instead…
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