science and religion

Rev. Richard John Neuhaus broke with the Left and helped, throughout his influential career, to broker allegiances between conservative Protestants and Roman Catholics—especially around hot-button issues like stem-cell research, abortion, and gay marriage.

New federal regulations, enacted by the lame-duck Bush administration, privilege the religious or moral scruples of physicians over a patient’s right to treatment. 40 million Americans have physicians who will not present them with all the options for treatment.

The numbers are in and you, the reader, have chosen your favorite RD stories of the year; from Rick Warren to AIPAC, Sarah Palin, Creationism 2.0 and the fabled “death” of the religious right.

John Travolta’s 16-year-old son is found dead and our celebrity culture is quick to blame the religion of his parents, Scientology. So much harder to face the fact of death, to look beyond the spectacle of someone else’s tragedy and toward our own frailty and error.

There’s a surprising quality to the prayers left at the feet of a statue of Jesus at the Johns Hopkins University Hospital; they’re not simple petitions or requests for an all-powerful God to fix their problems—they are snippets of ongoing conversations.

As we help US culture emerge from its anti-scientific faith moment, we need to stress a rational morality.

Evolution has given us the complex, nuanced ability to wrestle with complex issues. If God did drive the process, then surely God wants us to think hard about an issue like abortion…

Many will draw hasty conclusions from a new breakthrough on the cancer front. The real breakthroughs have been telling us that what we—our genes and cells— experience, can affect our children and our children’s children.

A generation after the infamous Scopes Trial, a biology teacher, Susan Epperson, went to court and won the right to teach evolution theory. Even the election of a new, more science-friendly administration, however, does not ensure that the Bible will no longer be used as a science textbook.

RD News Round-Up—November 24, 2008: Religious Right’s ‘Obama Watch’; RaptureReady.com getting readier; Focus on the Family’s ‘I Stand for Christmas’ campaign; Proposition 8: The Aftermath; Huckabee’s revenge; Christian doctrine cures OCD?