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The Cult of Kurzweil: Will Robots Save Our Souls?

By Robert M. Geraci

…Kurzweil has been beatified. Transcendent Man, a biographical documentary about Kurzweil, cruised into film festivals in 2009 and received wide accolades around the time of its 2011 digital release. Like any good hagiography, the film revels in Kurzweil’s genius as well as his eccentricity: one moment we see blind people praising him for changing their lives with his reading machines and the next moment we hear Kurzweil promising that he will res…

“A Feminine Complaint Against Theologians”

By Susan Henking

…of a 2010 documentary called Art of the Steal. Elsewhere in the magazine, science raised and answered questions that seem so contemporary: Can science help parents choose in advance the sex of their baby? The answer: not now, but perhaps before very long. That same magazine included this commentary on the era’s pessimism: If the world outside was anything like the one described at commencements across the U.S. last week, the 1960s graduate would…

Blaming the Listener: NPR’s Non-Apology

By Candace Chellew-Hodge

…clearly worked hard on this story. They simply made some wrong assumptions about what most of us know about sexuality and conversion.” But they should have worked harder—the fault here does not lie with their audience. The fundamental pieces that were missed are numerous, but the first one is rather glaring. Spiegel is a health reporter, not a religion reporter. This is important because the “debate” over “reparative therapy” in psychological and…

Are Atheists The New Campus Crusaders?

By Katherine Don

…in revelation or something like that, but they have faith in reason and in science, as I understand it, as a guide for human flourishing.” “I don’t think it’s unfair to say that groups like Cru are our cultural opponents,” says Galef at SSA. “It comes down to which values we’re promoting. We are promoting values of critical thinking and acceptance.” Conflicting values on campus have led to unsavory events. Last year at Salisbury University in Mary…

Religious Affiliation, ‘Mankind’: India’s Anti-Corruption Activist Leads Second Freedom Struggle

By April L. Bogle

…d degrees they would later achieve. Bedi has a master of arts in political science, a law degree, and a PhD in social science. “While others girls my age were preparing to marry and putting together their dowries, my parents sent us to school and put tennis racquets in our hands,” said Bedi. Tennis instilled the value of fair play and self-discipline. While the list of Bedi’s tennis championships is quite long, she’s quick to point out that sister…

On Women’s Equality Day, Going Back to the Sacred Texts of Feminism

By Betty M. Bayer

…heism—thanks to a very old-boyish mainstream media coverage. We hear a lot about Dawkins and Hitchens, but not about freethinkers like Jennifer Michael Hecht or Susan Jacoby. In their work, both Hecht and Jacoby take note of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s unconventional religious views, and of the productive space of “doubt” in social movements. Jacoby notes further of the tendency today to “downplay secularist leanings” among pro-choice groups, highlig…

Who Gets Paid to Make America Hate? The Roots of the Islamophobia Network

By Haroon Moghul

…ngerous: A monied and sophisticated indifference to reality. Islam today, science tomorrow. (No, wait; make that misrepresenting Islam and science today.) We must keep in mind the effect this will have on our constitutional rights and freedoms. Those who want to target the rituals and practices of a misunderstood religious community can very easily expand their target to other populations. We’ve come too far as a country, in terms of the righ…

Which is the ‘Real’ Reality?: Doctor Who Part IV

By Henry Jenkins

…ed by his own psyche. Presumably that is the danger of exploring questions about reality and dreams. Sometimes such explorations do not merely confront us with difficult choices about the future. Sometimes they reveal our own self-loathing. And here too we find the Doctor entering a realm intimately connected with religion, both in the sense that religion has often offered both accusation and forgiveness, but also in the sense that often we projec…

Bachmann’s “Dangerous” Summit

By Sarah Posner

…e deck is stacked against you when you discuss creation and evolution. How about a silver bullet. . . . from the guy that caused the foremost evolutionist in the world to admit that evolution is not science?” As Lauri Lebo reported for RD last year, Johnson is the brains behind the Discovery Institute’s Wedge Document, the aim of which is to “defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies; and to replace…

The British (Bible) Invasion: KJV 400-Year Anniversary Rolls On

By Louis A. Ruprecht

…nel West. Bragg’s book is an extraordinary compendium of information, less about the creation of the KJV than about its long cultural aftermath. It thus supplements the story of the creation of KJV as told quite brilliantly by Adam Nicholson in God’s Secretaries (2003) and by Lori Anne Ferrell in The Bible and the People (Ferrell was responsible, along with Kathleen Lynch, for the Folger Conference). If the result is a difficult book to read, then…