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At the Creation Museum in Kentucky, a place that promotes the idea that all of these layers of rock got created at once through Noah’s Flood—and yet right under their feet is this beautifully vetted stretch of limestone, it’s really too finely laminated and too extensive to possibly be explained by something like that. So you look at these things and you have to ask, what do you make of the world? Can the world tell its own story?

An Election ’08 Manifesto for Messiness: A tart plea for nuanced religion coverage…

A pair of historians discuss Republican rep. Todd Akin’s remarks on “legitimate rape”: the female body carries a huge burden of representation: her ability to protect the boundaries of her body, and to maintain her purity, reflects the church’s ability to do the same.

“I was washing dishes in the kitchen when I stopped believing in God. Years later, I’m often unsettled at how much of my life I’d spent in that kitchen and how little of it I can recall, except for that one moment. Overwhelmed by constant desperation, I turned suddenly courageous, pondered what might happen if He didn’t exist, decided that He didn’t, and then He was gone. I think the rapid departure hit me the hardest. How had I been so easily taken in?” —An excerpt from Haroon Moghul’s essay in All American: 45 American Men on Being Muslim

What Akin says about the state of the GOP on abortion and contraception.

Why is a gay secular humanist academic who left the world of orthodox fundamentalist evangelicalism half a life time ago still singularly captivated by Southern gospel music? Why, in the book’s terminology, have I been a Southern gospel sissy lo these many years since evangelicalism ceased to otherwise be a functional worldview for me? And why am I still proud and happy about it? Turned outward, the question becomes: What is it about the music that supports so many various affections and attachments?

Rather than approach stories on their own uncomfortable terms, Rick Warren’s new diet plan pulls exiled, bewildered Daniel away from the king’s table and demands, “Tell me the secret to controlling your carb intake!”

Without question, Land will be remembered for his important roles in America’s culture wars, especially with regard to abortion and gay rights: he helped give the SBC a public witness that stood in consistent opposition to gay rights, abortion rights and even many forms of birth control. A once moderately pro-choice denomination was transformed into a “pro-life” denomination largely under Land’s leadership. He also narrowly defined “pro-life” for evangelicals to mean strictly “anti-abortion,” eschewing the more expansive understanding of that concept offered by the Catholic Church.

After Baptist bookstore chain LifeWay refused to stock evangelical darling The Blind Side, some Christian authors are challenging what one calls the store’s “stranglehold” on Christian books. Is this the end of retailers’ control over industry standards?

In the Muslim world, pluralism collides with democracy and sovereignty, which is far more interesting and alarming than the battle lines we’ve imposed on the Middle East—of secularists versus Islamists, of free-thinking liberals versus religious autocrats.