This column from Jim Wallis and Sandi Villareal in Sojourners offers some discussion on the PP abortion tissue videos (2015) and the image of God: “As a society and as individuals, when we fail to recognize the imago dei in others, we trend further away from our uniquely human capacity to empathize and closer to […]
An exchange students can learn from is going on between sociologist Robert Wuthnow and the Pew Research Center. Wuthnow raises several concerns about the accuracy and conclusions of polling and surveys, particularly about culture shifts in religion. The Pew Research Center responds. Check the highlighted links here for content useful in sociology, statistics, journalism, psychology, […]
The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge (Jer. 31:29). This interview with Rachel Yehuda, Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, is an informative update on research in epigenetics. Yehuda discusses the current science, its application to the Holocaust and 9/11, and its implications for the intersection of the spiritual […]
This NPR 13.7 article on a cognitive science conference at UT Austin offers 15 videos on religion and cognition. The clips are 2 to 5 minutes long and address such questions as: How is the process of acquiring religious and scientific explanations similar? Why should scientists care about religion? How can evolutionary perspectives on […]
From Foreign Policy: There is a growing threat to religious freedom around the globe. In an earlier era, the greatest hostility to faith came from secular autocracies or totalitarian regimes. But that has changed. Today, the most active persecutors of religious minorities and dissenters are religious extremists. In this still-young century, the world has witnessed […]
The program, Scientists in Congregations, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, sought to cultivate a conversation on science and faith within congregations. The Pascal Project, in honor of Blaise Pascal (1623–1662, the brilliant French mathematician often considered the first thinker to seriously consider the intersection of faith with the natural sciences) included 35 congregations. See […]
Alan Jacobs reviews The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973 by Mark Greif (Princeton University Press, 2015). “For a long period in the mid-twentieth century, fundamental anthropology—the problematic nature of ‘man’—became a main rhetorical and contemplative current in the streams of thought and writing that shape a public philosophy.”
These two articles on sex identity and gender identity are written by Christopher O. Tollefsen, Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. They may be useful for helping students identify the forms of the Aristotelian/Thomist arguments (Luther or Bonhoeffer take a different approach) that favor […]
This review of the Planned Parenthood incident and their use of abortion organs and tissue can help students consider several elements of the controversy and particularly why the issues continue to be intractable. The discussion could be used with courses in research, journalism, ethics, psychology, pre-law, and other social sciences.
USAToday overviews several legal cases at stake regarding the civil rights of religious liberty and discrimination following the Supreme Court’s same-sex marriage decision. This popular press article can be used to update students on several pending cases and the broad contours of the arguments.
