Denise Rector

[1] All Christians think about eating. I’m contemplating the preparation of a mid-morning snack even as I write this. Many Christians say grace before they eat, in this way locating the act of eating doxologically. And some may practice certain vestigial forms of fasting, like eating fish (fry!) on Fridays, or foregoing chocolate during Lent. […]

[1] If truth is the first casualty of war, cynicism must be its last-and most enduring. Sadly, we have seen both in the war in Iraq. No one found WMDs, the stated reason for entering the war. Nor were there any discovered links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. The majority of Americans who believed […]

[1] One of Sharon Welch’s gifts is to take a common ethical question and discuss it in ways few have imagined. She transforms questions into prisms which invite us to turn them in the light and meditate on what the resulting refractions might mean for our moral vision. In After Empire, Welch approaches an issue […]

[1] It is perhaps surprising that given the wide ethnic and religious pluralism that have long been characteristic of the United States, that there have not been more incidents of tension and conflict between different groups of Americans. Certainly there have been such incidents, often in times of war or national upheaval, and some of […]

[1] This year, my three-year-old granddaughter wanted a doll for Christmas – but a very special kind of doll. “I want a doll just like me,” she instructed the family. “Only better.” [2] My granddaughter was not envisioning a doll manufactured by cloning her genetic material, or generated by cultivating an embryonic stem cell line, […]

“The science of alchemy I like very well, and indeed, ’tis the philosophy of the ancients. I like it not only for the profits it brings in melting metals, in decocting, preparing, extracting and distilling herbs, roots; I like it also for the sake of the allegory and secret signification, which is exceedingly fine, touching […]

[1] What is Nanotechnology? Most of us have some idea of what technology means, but it is the “nano” prefix that is puzzling. A nanometer is one-millionth of a millimeter, so the scale that we are looking at is miniscule. When we think about what sizes we see under a microscope, we are usually thinking […]

[1] The hopes for nanotechnology are evident in the amount of public funding devoted to it over the past few years.[1] Nanotechnology, indeed, has been proclaimed the source for a revolution comparable to the emergence of the steam engine, electrification, or computer technology.[2] The visions for nanotechnology include advancing broad societal goals such as better […]

[1] Archetypal images of religion in American life filled our TV screens in early January. The cameras fixed their fickle eyes on a small white-frame church amid the worn hills of Sago, West Virginia. A coal mine explosion, Jan. 2, trapped 13 miners in the cold blackness of the mine. Above ground, mining officials and […]

[1] Nanotechnology refers to a cluster of technologies directed to making, studying and manipulating structures at the nanometre scale. The prefix ‘nano’ comes from the Greek word nanos meaning dwarf, i.e. nano refers to something small. Nano designates 10-9 which means that one nanometre (nm) is one thousand millionth of a metre (Table 1). [2] […]