News > Issues
These Scientists Can’t Tolerate the Pope
"Sixty one Italian scientists have signed a letter protesting against a planned visit this week by Pope Benedict XVI to Rome's Sapienza University because of his stated views on Galileo... Then Cardinal Ratzinger ... observed that 'At the time of Galileo the Church remained much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself. The process against Galileo was reasonable and just.' The Italian Catholic writer Vittorio Messori agreed, saying Galileo 'was not condemned for the things he said, but for the way he said them. He made statements with sectarian intolerance...'" READ MORE >
Opinion > TV
Did anyone miss the Golden Globes show?
The Golden Globes awards were awarded last night, but without the usual glitzy televised gala, thanks to the Writer’s Guild strike. This prompts the question—how essential is the show anyway? Sure, we get to rubberneck on the red carpet thanks to first-hand reporting from second-hand personalities like Joan Rivers and that embarrassing… READ MORE >
Opinion > Movies
Good Movies, Bad Religion
In the past week I had the privilege of seeing two amazing films: There Will Be Blood (bit on the long side) and the uncut version of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander (a whopping five-plus hours that fly by). Interestingly, coincidentally, both stories are set about a 100 years ago and both feature a very dark religious figure—a money-hungry… READ MORE >
News > Movies
Movie Violence Might Temper the Real Thing
"“The study’s premise strikes me as somewhat goofy,' said Melissa Henson, senior director of programs at the Parents Television Council, a media watchdog... 'I’d hate for people to walk away with the message that, ‘Oh, I ought to send my son to watch violent movies so they won’t go out and drink or do drugs and commit violent crime...’" READ MORE >
Opinion > Issues
Catholic Bishops in England and Wales take on secularism
The Catholic Church in England and Wales is moving into political high gear. On Wednesday last week Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor hosted a meeting of 25 Catholic MPs in preparation for the forthcoming parliamentary battle over the Human Fertilization and Embryology Bill – provoking the ire of secularists. “The church is at it again,”… READ MORE >
Opinion > Issues
Michael Massing: An Inconvenient Truth Teller
Two years ago for GodSpy I interviewed press critic Michael Massing about his Columbia Journalism Review essay that criticized the New York Times for ignoring public concern about the harmful effects of pop culture on children. In an interesting twist, Massing in the New York Review of Books this week cites a GodSpy interview in an essay he’s… READ MORE >
News > Science/Tech
Taking Science on Faith
Unlike biologists, who get tarred with the brush of Creationism at the slightest mention of the G-word, physicists have been free to bring God into their speculation. Here, physicist Paul Davies explains the obvious: that both religion and science are confronted with mysteries that can’t be reduced to theories or empirical investigation.… READ MORE >
News > Faith
Why Benedict XVI Is So Cautious with the Letter of the 138 Muslims
Few observers are more hardnosed and skeptical about dialogue with Islam than Sandro Magister. Sometimes he goes overboard, but here he’s probably right to contrast the fawning response by 300 Christian scholars to the Muslim “letter of the 138” to the Pope’s more toughminded, nuanced stance. How many apologies for… READ MORE >
News > Science/Tech
After Stem-Cell Breakthrough, the Work Begins
Now that embryonic stem cell research may no longer require the destruction of human life, is it just a coinicidence that the NY Times is emphasizing how far scientists still have to go to develop successful treatments?
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Reviews > Books
The Dawkins Confusion
“The God Delusion is full of bluster and bombast, but it really doesn’t give even the slightest reason for thinking belief in God mistaken, let alone a ‘delusion.’ Dawkins seems to have chosen God as his sworn enemy. (Let’s hope for Dawkins’ sake God doesn’t return the compliment.)... You might say… READ MORE >
Reviews > Music
Wilco frontman takes a more direct lyrical approach on striking new album
“...alienation seemed to be the point on Wilco’s overly arch art-rock projects Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born, but on Sky Blue Sky Tweedy reaches out from his solitude in hopes of meeting his listeners—both the woman in the song and the strangers buying his CDs—face-to-face… The album’s title track contrasts our… READ MORE >
Reviews > Movies
A Chronicler of Alienated Europeans in a Flimsy New World
“Mr. Antonioni’s fashionableness shouldn’t distract us from his accomplishment. He was a visionary whose portrayal of the failure of Eros in a hypereroticized climate addressed the modern world and its discontents in a new, intensely poetic cinematic language. Here was depicted for the first time on screen a world in which attention… READ MORE >
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