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Steven Waldman

Our excerpt from Robert Wright’s important new book Evolution of God focuses on the origins of the modern idea of heaven. Wright suggests that Luke evolved the idea of heaven to compensate for the fact that the anticiated resurrection of the dead hadn’t happened yet. Had Christian doctrine not evolved in response to this challenge,…

Efforts to achieve common ground on abortion often stumble over the role of contraception. For pro-choicers, it’s a no brainer: if you want to reduce abortions, reduce unintended pregnancies – and the best way to do that is through better family planning. But the pro-life movement usually opposes family planning for a wide range of…

The day Sarah Palin announced her resignation as Alaska governor, I wrote a post speculating on whether there was anyone who could stop her from getting the Republican nomination. (Answer: Huckabee). I was surprised to see that most of the subsequent commentary was not on whether she was a lock for the nomination or merely…

For months now, pro-choice activists have resisted those pro-life Democrats who said they wanted to “reduce the number” of abortions. No, no, they said, the goal should be “reducing the need” for abortion, a goal that’s less stigmatizing to women who have abortions. Did President Obama tell Pope Benedict point blank that he wants to…

Beliefnet Blogger Francis Collins was nominated to be head of the National Institutes of Health! Okay, being a Beliefnet blogger is not Francis Collin’s main claim to fame, though the blog that he and his BioLogos foundation run — Science and the Sacred — is fascinating, stimulating and often inspiring. He’s probably more appropriately known…

Referring to her political future, Sarah Palin said, “If I die, I die.” When I first heard this I assumed this language was designed to feed the Christian sense of persecution. Turns out it’s even more Biblically resonant than that. Esther 4:15: “When this is done, I will go to the king, even though it…

Perhaps by the time Michael Jackson was an adult, he was drawn toward the outrageous, unusual or abnormal, but as a child he seemed to want nothing more than to be like other kids. “More than anything, I wished to be a normal little boy,” he wrote in an extraordinary essay on Beliefnet in 2000.…

As a parent of two teenage boys, we’re in a constant struggle to figure out what movies or TV shows are appropriate. (The latest debate: Bruno). It’s a struggle, and the source of much friction, but we figure it’s our parental responsibility to try to regulate sexual content. Then I saw this Burger King campaign…

To me, the most important points in my email exchange with pro-life activist Jill Stanek were: 1) She believes that contraception and sex ed increase the number of unintended pregnancies 2) Even if she could be convinced that sex ed reduced the number of abortions, she still would not support it. Many in the comment…

Though largely about the disturbing way much of our food is produced, the most haunting scene for me in the movie Food, Inc. shows how meat processing and poultry plants recruit illegal immigrants — and then work with law enforcement to insure that the immigrants get arrested and deported at a nice liesurely pace so…
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