Religion Dispatches
Do Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher, and other true believers really offer a different path, or are their methods and manner merely a mirror image of the fundamentalism they so despise? We are spiritual animals and must learn to live with the complexities and paradoxes of religion—and of the natural world as well.
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Unless you are a geneticist the answer may surprise you. The ethical problems with cloning turn out to be the result of some confusion about what cloning is, and isn’t.
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Dr. Eric Goosby, Obama’s pick to run the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS relief, will face the challenge of faith-based opposition to condom distribution, among other difficulties, when he assumes this important position.
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When you consider the Pope on condoms, a hospital’s failure to follow simple precautions, and the fading of activism, we’re still coming up short in the fight against AIDS. Still, even at the intersection of AIDS and religion, the news ain’t all bad.
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A Massachusetts nurse loses her job after talking to a dying patient about religion. What does this case reveal about the place of sprituality in American hospitals?
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A host of experimental new drugs interfere with the process of creating memory, promising to help combat sufferers, addicts and others. But if memory is required for the creation of ethics (and religion) and indeed in the formation of who we are, what effect might these drugs have on our identities?
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We have failed, as a society—for millennia—to ascribe worth to the one sustaining gift of the universe that we touch and feel every day: the earth itself. Rex Weyler, co-founder of Greenpeace, has an Earth Day message about ecology, community, and spirit.
Read MoreOpening the door to “junk science,” members of the Texas Board of Education inserted the coded language of creationism. With the second largest textbook budget in the nation, publishers are paying close attention.
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A recent New Republic book review argued that science and religion cannot be reconciled. In response, biologist Arri Eisen suggests that we acknowledge the ‘pink elephant’—the thorny questions that arise when religion and science meet—and use it as an opportunity to teach and learn about the conflicting perspectives.
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Modern medicine can prolong the lives of dying people, but in doing so it often prolongs suffering. Do religious arguments against suicide apply in these tragic cases?
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