Professor Rodney Stark has written about “the unique Christian conviction that progress was a God-given obligation”—which may strike some as odd, given that the Catholic Church condemned Galileo Galilei, the “father of science” himself, as a heretic for saying that the Earth moved around the sun. Galileo and the Scopes “monkey trial” generally form the Catholic and Protestant bookends of the … [Read More]

1001 Inventions describes itself as “a unique UK-based educational project that reveals the rich heritage that the Muslim community share with other communities in the UK and Europe.” It says that it is “a non-religious and non-political project seeking to allow the positive aspects of progress in science and technology to act as a bridge in understanding the interdependence of communities … [Read More]

Friedrich Nietzsche once noted that “there is no such thing as science ‘without any presuppositions.’…A philosophy, a ‘faith,’ must always be there first, so that science can acquire from it a direction, a meaning, a limit, a method, a right to exist.” (Thomas Woods made much of this assertion in his excellent book.) It may be jarring to those who believe … [Read More]

Last October, a Syrian Orthodox priest, Fr. Boulos Iskander, went shopping for auto parts in the Iraqi city of Mosul. He was never seen alive again. A Muslim group kidnapped him and initially demanded $350,000 in ransom; they eventually lowered this to $40,000, but added a new demand: Fr. Boulos’ parish had to denounce the remarks made the previous month by … [Read More]