Operator, give me information. Information, give me long distance. Long distance, give me heaven. . . . Give me Jesus on the line. —“Operator,” The Manhattan Transfer, 1975 What is the Bible? Most obviously, a book—hence its English name, from the Greek biblion, “book.” Like any book it consists (or used always to consist, until […]
If you could go back in time and genetically engineer Jesus—wave some futuristic gizmo over Mary’s womb and edit his DNA—would you do it? Would you trust a large, for-profit corporation to do it? In 2001, David Quist and Ignacio Chapela of U.C. Berkeley announced in Nature that transgenes—chunks of DNA artificially transferred from one species […]
I’ve been thinking about zealotry. Religious zealotry is as common as pig tracks: the very word zealot derives from a militant first-century Jewish group resisting Roman occupation. There is plenty in this department to expose, reject, and confess. But what is saddening and disturbing me at the moment is the zealotry of a group that I […]
Kazmir commented on my previous post, “Any speculations about why white American evangelical Protestants are so slow in catching up with the rest of the world on the issue of climate change?” Good question. Such a good question that my reply is big enough to be a post. First, let’s keep in mind that according […]
When it comes to science, Christians are too often on the defensive: the Earth is so stationary (stamp foot), we are not descended from monkeys, and so on. Or else we can be heard elaborately explaining why science is OK by us after all — a project with which I have much sympathy. But one […]
It is tempting but tricky to ask if something at the theological roots of Christianity and Islam makes one or the other inherently friendly or hostile to evolution. The attempt has been made by G. Willow Wilson in an essay for Science and Spirit titled “Only in America” (2007).1 Wilson begins by reviewing the case of Kitzmiller […]
I am quite sure that we should all be very humble. At least, I think I’m sure — I’ve heard it so many times from so many authorities. If there is one perfectly reliable, utterly safe platitude in science writing, it is that we should all be very, very humble. The platitude comes with […]
[Originally posted Jan. 25, 2009] I’ve been thinking about numbers lately. A few days ago it was 758, 257, and 10. Today it’s 1010, 315, and 13. Science is big on numbers. If you can’t count or measure a thing, you can’t do science on it. So does the converse hold? If you can count […]
William T. Cavanaugh effectively challenges contemporary treatments of religion and its culpability in violence, but his study raises other questions about what occurs theologically behind the church’s disordered politics.
