Holier Than You and Me: ‘Religious Liberty’ Is the New Bully Pulpit and Its New Meaning Is Endangering Our Way of Life and What Good Is Religious Freedom? Locke, Rand, and the Non-Religious Case for Respecting It — Here are two additional discussions on the role of religion in society and its complications.
Majority of Americans Oppose Transgender Bathroom Restrictions: Here are the current PRRI survey breakdowns on several religion-and-society issues including transgender bathroom laws, church endorsement of political candidates, marriage issues, LGBT issues and more.
Would You Become An Immortal Machine? This brief review of a new book on transhumanism, To Be a Machine by Mark O’Connell (Doubleday, 2017) asks, Since “The Fall,” we “lost” our god-like immortality, and have been looking for ways to regain it. Can science do this? Is mortality merely a scientific question?
Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court, and Religious Freedom: This essay (in support of the Gorsuch nomination to the Supreme Court) provides an inventory of legal issues related to religious liberty that can help students organize this complex topic. “In the United States, the law of religious freedom and church-state relations can be imperfectly, but still […]
The Doctrine of Discovery: The March 2017 edition of Journal of Lutheran Ethics examines the legal and theological rationale with which Europeans justified the often violent (at times genocidal) conquest and colonization of lands which had already been “discovered” and populated. The doctrine of discovery is a theologically grounded legal rationale that kings and popes invented […]
A New Form of Stem Cell Engineering Raises Ethical Questions: The journal eLife reports that researchers can now produce synthetic embryos by assembling stem cells that will then organize themselves into biological structures. This technique may make it possible to produce specific tissues and organs including synthetic human entities with embryo-like features: SHEEFs. See also Addressing the […]
KRAB zinc-finger proteins contribute to the evolution of gene regulatory networks: the science journal Nature has published new research on transposons, indicating ways in which the human genetics system is species-specific and suggesting the protein activity of “KZFPs contribute to make human biology unique.” See also: The proteins that domesticated our genomes Harnessing the Human […]
How a Christian movement is growing rapidly in the midst of religious decline: Among the five Christ-and-culture perspectives, “INC Christianity is a movement to watch because we think it will continue to draw adherents in large numbers in the future. It will produce a growing number of Christians who see their goal not just as saving […]
Religious Exemption from Employment Discrimination Center of Appeals Court Case: The Second Federal Appeals Court appeared to favor arguments that would shield religious schools from many charges of discrimination. Joanne Fratello, who served as principal at St. Anthony’s, a Catholic school in Nanuet, New York, sued when the school opted not to renew her contract. […]
Gene Editing: Promise & Peril–Is Caution Enough? This Lutheran bioethics scholar comments on CRISPR: What is deemed necessary is the use of countless embryos—always, of course, with caution and with relief of suffering as the ultimate end in view. [And] there remains one further possibility on the gene-editing horizon. Beyond basic research, there is the possibility […]
