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If the Obama Administration sticks with Bush’s faith-based initiatives they would do well to avoid the numerous mistakes and predilection for corruption that haunted the Bush version.

Tom Daschle, a pro-choice and pro-stem cell Catholic, will serve as Obama’s Secretary of Health and Human Services. Though attacked in the past, he has a history of keeping church and state separate.

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?

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.

While the LDS Church’s leadership role in the passage of Proposition 8 may have been a surprising new direction for observers here in the United States, the Church has been instrumental in the organization of a world-spanning alliance of right-wing Christians and Muslims.

Soulforce, an organization dedicated to changing the hearts of those who discriminate against LGBT people based on religious belief, takes the message to conservative colleges and learns, firsthand, the eleventh commandment: Thou Shalt Not Trespass on Campus.

It has become common to blame the black community for the passage of California’s same-sex marriage ban. A look at the statistics and logic put the lie to this seductive and simplistic narrative.

Is authentic religious commitment incompatible with critical thinking, reason, or compromise, as philosopher Simon Critchley seems to imply in a recent essay on Obama? Or is our challenge to refuse the false oppositions between total transformation and conflict, or politics and piety?

In the midst of a global financial crisis one sector has yet to suffer the fate of the rest. Islamic finance, or Sharia-compliant banking, offers strict moral guidelines for dealing with money. Trading debt and risky speculation are off-limits, as is investment in immoral enterprises like gambling, prostitution, and war profiteering. It might be time to get the muftis on the phone.

According to Zen, ignorance is the grand-daddy of suffering. That some AIDS victims are “innocent” and some not is not only ignorant, but the antithesis of compassion.