Two long-running debates involving the supposed purity of science have flared anew. A recent editorial in the UK’s New Statesmen that cautioned against the politicizing of science (using climate change as a prime example) kicked up a Twitter storm and has provoked numerous responses, including this one from a science policy expert in the Guardian headlined (probably to the author’s…Continue Reading…
My mother-in-law is is one of the kindest, most open-minded persons I know. A retired elementary school teacher who taught for four decades in a gritty urban district, she radiates intelligence and goodness. She stands with science on all the hot-button issues of our day, such as evolution. Now in her early 80s, she is…Continue Reading…
In her book Doubt: A History, the scholar and poet Jennifer Hecht writes about having awe for the universe without being religious. She talked about this during a radio interview: It seems that if you have a doctrine, a version of rationalism or a version of atheism that makes it so that you have to be worried about using the…Continue Reading…
My, how times have changed. Thirty years ago, what was the likelihood of Americans electing a black president and accepting gay marriage? We really have progressed, haven’t we? Or maybe not. In 1982 (the year synthetic insulin was created via genetic engineering, by the way), 44% of Americans believed that God created humans in their…Continue Reading…
Roger Cohn, the editor of Yale Environment 360, conducted an interesting interview with Mary Evelyn Tucker, a scholar who studies the intersection of ecology and religion. This is a perennial interest of mine, even though I’m a life-long atheist. Most people in the world (including many scientists) possess a religious faith or seek out some kind…Continue Reading…
This plea from an evangelical is interesting: Don’t believe the worst about us””it may only empower the worst in us. Keep the faith in building bridges. Reach out. Speak the truth in love to evangelicals you know. That will require looking for openness to conversation with evangelicals wherever it can be found. Willis, in classic…Continue Reading…
Despite my many faults, I’m a nice guy. I can be too sarcastic for some, and lately I’ve been cranky because of a growing sleep deficit, but those who know me know I’m a caring, good-natured person. This is not meant to sound self-serving. Think of it as background context for the anecdote I’m about…Continue Reading…
We have an annual event in the U.S. that I think is kind of hokey but also well-meaning. After reading this dispatch from the recent Ecological Society of America conference, I thought maybe the idea could be broadened a bit, into something that allowed a local pastor to tag along with an ecologist or climate scientist…Continue Reading…
When he was two or three, my oldest son asked, “who’s that,” when we walked past this shrine in our neighborhood. Not sure what to say, my wife blurted out, “that’s Jesus in a box.” And so for a while, every time we walked by it, my son would point and say, “There’s Jesus in…Continue Reading…
If you have time for only one long-form journalism story this week, read “The Apostate” by Lawrence Wright in the current issue of the The New Yorker. (The story is not behind a paywall.) Wright’s piece is superb on multiple levels- as a profile of a wayward young man who goes on to become an…Continue Reading…