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While the impact on the actual writing of textbooks may not be that dire the Texas Board of Education is clearly rewriting history to fit a conservative agenda and a Christian dominant worldview. Plus: The Ten Most Egregious Proposed Changes to the Social Studies Curriculum.

Why did the chairman of golf’s most prestigious tournament have the temerity to violate the Great Public Ritual of Celebrity Disgrace by publicly castigating Tiger Woods just as he was headed for redemption? Did Woods’ socially-proscribed moral transgressions simply provide Golf’s Old Guard a perfect opportunity to reassert who should be in and who should be out?

RD Editor Gary Laderman asked in a recent Op-Ed: “What Do Christians Believe?” Here, a writer and a pastor take a stab at addressing that provocative question.

Christian Soldiers of the Apocalypse have been running around the woods of Michigan planning attacks on federal law enforcement in their war against the Antichrist. How does the Hutaree Militia fit into the history of American militias and conspiracy theorists?

Both evolutionary theory and climate change have scientific consensus, but explain that to state lawmakers seeking to ‘teach the controversy.’ This is broader than attacks on specific scientific disciplines. In a way, it doesn’t matter to them which scientific discipline they are criticizing—their main thrust is a denial of the validity of science itself

In the ever more dystopian world of Syfy Channel’s Caprica, teenage girls inhabit robot bodies, or live eternally without bodies at all, human bodies are marked by memories, and all the while there is blood flowing in the virtual streets.

What do you get when you add taqwa, or God-consciousness, to the punk suffix “-core”? Can something be Islamic without being religious? As journalists try to get a handle on this genre- and culture-bending mashup, RD associate editor Hussein Rashid gets right to the source.

More on the sci-fi TV show that imagines monotheists rebelling against a polytheist society, speculates about the nature of the human soul, and asks, “Can you be free if you’re not real?”

RD’s senior editor sits down with philosopher Jacob Needleman, whose autobiography What is God? describes his journey from young Ivy-educated professor and atheist, to talk about fundamentalism, atheism, separating the sacred from religion, and why listening is the first step of every ethics.

The Vatican’s Web site considers a patron saint of the internet, Muslims debate divorce by text, and Jews pray by email; How does the inevitable transition to the virtual realm affect religious experience across the world?