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Bill Gates’ Comments on Covid-19 Vaccine Enflame ‘Mark of the Beast’ Worries in Some Christian Circles

By Christopher James Blythe

…estern consumerism. Microchip technology has since replaced the UPC as the most likely candidate for the introduction of a cashless society and thus the mark of the beast. While there have been various experiments with human microchipping on a limited basis, there remains a strong objection to the development only partly for biblical reasons. Others are deeply uneasy over the potential for intrusive surveillance and whether such technology would b…

The Problem with AMC’s Sci-Fi Hit Humans

By Andrew Aghapour

…y just don’t look like us. Any future involving the displacement of humans most likely belongs to “theroids,” a vast menagerie of mechanical beasts. Robots taking jobs Humans’ title sequence opens with grainy video clips documenting the progress of android dexterity and intelligence. A giant metal hulk gives way to articulating arms and fingers; soon robots are sewing, moving chess pieces, and playing the violin; and finally, snippets of advertisi…

Dutch Treat: Betsy DeVos and the Christian Schools Movement

By Peter Laarman

…hard for anyone not to admire the grit and determination of people with no more money than the rest of us—farmers and small business owners—who were willing to tax themselves to support these religious schools while also paying taxes in support of the public system. Today, however they expect all taxpayers to support and subsidize their “choice.” Grit and determination: that’s the Dutch Calvinist way. It’s a small tribe that wants to get big thing…

National Review’s Kevin Williamson Comes Out Against Daughters, Misunderstands Science

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…he “if” statement, there is no “then” statement. Those who have tried to demonstrate the existence of Trivers-Willard in humans generally don’t even try to demonstrate it with actual sex ratios (which are notoriously noisy sets of data), but with measures of parental investment, such as “time spent with sons vs. daughters”. What they come up with is that there is, wonder of wonders, a lot of gendered cultural variation in parenting. (No! You think…

How the COVID-19 Pandemic May Permanently Change Our ‘Good Death’ Narrative

By Cody J. Sanders

…naries. Typically, the Good Death is an approximation of the kind of death most people of some racial and economic privilege in the society enjoy. Periodically, a crisis disrupts the possibility of that Good Death for a whole society. We are now living through―and dying within―such a disruption. The global pandemic of COVID-19 will challenge our potential for a Good Death in ways we haven’t imagined or prepared for. In a class I’m teaching at Chic…

A Rationalist’s Ghost Story

By Gary Jansen

…nted to tell people about it all because it was just so bizarre. So I did, mostly friends and colleagues, at first. Many people suggested I write a book about my experiences, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that for the simple reason that if you tell someone, especially a stranger, that you might have a ghost in your house, the probability of that person thinking you’re crazy is rather high. As someone who had written about spirituality in the pa…

None Means None (Not Atheist, Agnostic, Unbeliever…)

By Elizabeth Drescher

…ssuming that the recent data on the religiously unaffiliated suggests that most Nones see moral efforts to “concentrate on the fate of this world” as primarily secular undertakings, however much it is surely possible to do so without a religiously informed worldview. At the end of the day, that is, it is no less inappropriate for atheists (or, one atheist, though another one takes the same route through the Pew data here) to suggest that all of th…

Data-Mining The Denominations: The Southern Baptists in Four Charts

By Daniel Schultz

…st Convention—the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, and one of its most conservative—has problems as well. The SBC had been almo*]}*st flat on the membership charts for a number of years, but now it’s actually started to lose members. In 2013, the SBC claimed 15,735,640 members, and in 2014, that number fell by 236,467 to 15,499,173—that’s a 1.5 percent decline. However, on this stat alone, the claim could be made that churches are simply clea…

Elephant Orphans and Ecological Spiritualities: An Earth Day Reflection

By Jacob J. Erickson

…r the Danish immigrant who once had a farm here early in the 20th century. Most people in the U.S. know its namesake Karen Blixen in the guise of Meryl Streep, who portrayed Blixen in the award-winning film Out of Africa, based on Blixen’s own writings. And Blixen, of course, went by a number of famous pen names—Isak Dinesen is one—writing some of the most fascinating and beautiful theological stories of her time. Most notable is Babette’s Feast.…

LGBT Editor In Bangladesh Murdered by Islamists—and More, In this Week’s Global LGBT Recap

By Peter Montgomery

…ked him in 1997 in Tashkent, the capital of this former Soviet republic, a mostly Muslim nation of 31 million. Yan was helped by living in the relatively cosmopolitan city of Tashkent, which he says is a world apart from the countryside when transgender people can be raped and killed with impunity. “Their parents, family won’t even interfere,” Yan says over a steaming cup of tea. “Because they think it is a sin, a crime against God.” The LA Times…