Religion Dispatches
I am a scholar of religion by profession, but I like to play in technology. So when the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the body responsible for generic top level domains (gTLD) like .com, .org., and .net, asked for proposals for new gTLD, I watched with some fascination. One of the earliest discussions was around allowing “.xxx” to indicate pornography-related sites. However, I am interested in a new round of names…
Read MoreIt’s been a week since 17-year-old Zack Kopplin called out Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann to back up her assertions that there are Nobel Prize winners who endorse intelligent design. And even though Kopplin’s challenge has gotten a fair share of media attention, there hasn’t been a peep about it from Bachmann’s office. Here is Kopplin on MSNBC’s HardBall with Chris Matthews. Love his statement, “Presidential candidates shouldn’t be able…
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I was born (and mostly raised) in Indiana, so let me start off with some classic Midwestern understatement: I’m not thrilled with Indiana’s political trajectory. Okay, now that my Hoosier bona fides are out of the way, let me tell you how I really feel: This week I’m once again deeply disappointed by my home state, which I’ve avoided living in as much as possible throughout my adult life. Indiana rarely disappoints at being a disappointment, and…
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Reza Aslan is the host of the new spiritual adventure series Believer, which tackles the battle between evangelical Christianity and Vodou in Haiti in this Sunday’s episode on CNN 7PT/10ET. After the massive earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010, the popular televangelist Pat Robertson went on his flagship TV program, the 700 Club, and made an extraordinary claim. The earthquake, he said, was just one consequence of a pact with the devil made…
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From yet another person, I’ve just received one of those supposedly curious emails about Barack Obama. But wait, what’s wrong with simply asking questions about our next potential president? Isn’t it about a free and open discourse, that quintessentially American trait? Well, here’s how you test it. When you see “Muslim” replace it with “Jew” or “Christian” (or any number of other affiliations) and ask yourself how you’d feel about receiving an a…
Read MoreThe results of the meaningless Values Voters Straw poll are in. In sum: the perceived frontrunners, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, are not frontrunners here (polling at four and eight percent, respectively) and (no surprise) Ron Paul brought a lot of supporters to give him a victory at 37%. The big story coming out of the conference is not the straw poll results. Paul is renowned for his fervent supporters showing up for straw polls; Herman Cain, wh…
Read MoreAlabama Governor Robert Bentley ordered the removal of four Confederate flags from the state capital grounds today, part of a remarkably rapid trend of banishing the flag from places where it might embarrass Republicans. But that will hardly make it, or the people who continue to revere it and what it represents, disappear. In the wake of Charleston, and the exposure of Dylann Roof’s white supremacist views, we are seeing reports of associations…
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Happy 200th birthday, Charles Darwin! You know I love you. So I hope you won’t mind if I take the occasion to toast the other side of the Pandora’s Box you opened, the side that may be feeling a little battered today: the creationists. They’ve worked hard over the last 150 years since your Origin of Species came out, and because they’re still alive and you’re not, why not celebrate you by celebrating them? Don’t worry, I’m a neo-Darwinian fundame…
Read MoreStanding in solidarity with Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and most of the Republican establishment (with some notable exceptions in Utah and a few other places), evangelical leaders have made their stand on the Trump tapes: sure, the comments were “inappropriate,” but they don’t rank high on the “hierarchy of concerns” of evangelicals. And anyway, that was 11 years ago, when he wasn’t a Christian and was a young man of 59, and now that he’s a ba…
Read MoreTuesday was announcement day for Jon Huntsman, Jr., the second Mormon former governor to join the field of Republican 2012 presidential contenders. His campaign team had chosen a classic location very much in the key of Ronald Reagan: Liberty State Park, New Jersey, where the candidate set up his podium against the backdrop of the Hudson and the Statue. (Even though you’d never know it from television close shots that entirely screened out Lady L…
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