In 1947, the United States Supreme Court took a sharp left turn in its interpretation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution as it was applied to public schools in America. Since then, students, teachers, school officials, parents, and local religious leaders have been struggling to understand the parameters of the Establishment Clause as it relates to religious expression in public schools. This resource is intended to help individuals understand their rights to exercise their faith in the public school arena. It is also designed to help families, students, teachers, school officials, and community leaders sort through the current legal maze of religious expression in America’s public schools.

Scientific Challenges to Evolutionary Theory: How These Challenges Affect Religion addresses all aspects of the giant battle between two major belief systems…those that believe in a ‘naturalistic worldview’ and evolution, and those that believe in a miracle-performing God and the Creation of all things. On a trip to Mount St. Helens, some look at the catastrophic eruption of May 18, 1981 as a significant corroboration of the Creation event. Others, deniers of the possibilities of miracles, hold to the view that God’s creation cannot be taken seriously by the scientific community. At the Mount St. Helens book store, I asked about books for sale that gave a Christian view of the catastrophic eruption. The reply was, “I’m sorry, sir, but we only carry books by scientists.” It was time for the author, Jay Schabacker, to do a little scientific sleuthing. Join Jay Schabacker as you learn of the hundreds, even thousands, of Ph.D. scientists who repudiate the theory of evolution, but hold rather to the truth of the theory of Creation. Significant general information, likely new to most readers gives corroborative evidence from many sources, including: • From all over the ancient world, hundreds of accounts of a global flood • Well documented accounts of the Ark of Noah, indeed, located at the top of Mount Ararat • Ancient ‘Near East’ finds, inscribed on rock, told of the actual details covered in the Holy Bible Numerous scientific papers refute the naturalistic dogma forced on us the government, public schools, universities and media. You’ll find arguments that assert: • The earth’s geological features appear to have been fashioned by rapid catastrophic processes that affected the earth on a global scale. • Life on earth was suddenly created, not over billions of years. • The use of radiometric dating method is often grossly in error. • The fossil record shows that all present living kinds of animals and plants have remained fixed since creation. • Mutations and natural selection are insufficient to have brought about any emergence of living kinds from a simple primordial organism. • The universe has “obvious manifestations of an ordered, structural plan and design.” The universe and the solar system were suddenly created. If evolution is wrong why are our children being only taught it in our public schools? Numerous polls favored biology teachers teaching Darwin’s Theory of evolution, but also the scientific evidence against it. The final section of the book gets further into the “Action Plan” where church pastors and members, scientist groups, etc., could make an important difference if: • We all read about the subject and started the conversation; • We gave our views to the school boards and legislators who are the decision makers; • We initiate needed petitions in support needed legislation; and • We urge church pastors to create their own church schools and concerned families to start home schooling for their children.

Since September 11, 2001, the profile of religion's role in our global society has increased significantly. Religion has long been a force in people's lives as numerous studies and polls show, yet we continue to struggle with understanding differing religious traditions and what they mean for our common life. There are few places where Americans can meet together to learn about each other and to share in the common construction of our futures. One such place for many is public education. The purpose of this book is to illustrate the complexity of the social, cultural, and legal milieu of schooling in the United States in which the improvement of religious literacy and understanding must take place. Public education is the new commons.We must negotiate this commons in two meanings of that term: first, we must come to mutual understandings and agreement about how to proceed toward a common horizon of a religiously plural America; second, we must work our way through the obstacles in these settings in practical ways to achieve results that work.

Warren Nord's thoughtful book tackles an issue of great importance in contemporary America: the role of religion in our public schools and universities. According to Nord, public opinion has been excessively polarized by those religious conservatives who would restore religious purposes and practices to public education and by those secular liberals for whom religion is irrelevant to everything in the curriculum. While he maintains that public schools and universities must not promote religion, he also argues that there are powerful philosophical, political, moral, and constitutional reasons for requiring students to study religion. Indeed, only if religion is included in the curriculum will students receive a truly liberal education, one that takes seriously a variety of ways of understanding the human experience. Intended for a broad audience, Nord's comprehensive study encompasses American history, constitutional law, educational theory and practice, theology, philosophy, and ethics. It also discusses a number of current, controversial issues, including multiculturalism, moral education, creationism, academic freedom, and the voucher and school choice movements.

This book offers a wide range of critical perspectives on how secularism unfolds and has been made sense of across Europe and Asia. The book evaluates secularism as it exists today – its formations and discontents within contemporary discourses of power, terror, religion and cosmopolitanism – and the focus on these two continents gives critical attention to recent political and cultural developments where secularism and multiculturalism have impinged in deeply problematical ways, raising bristling ideological debates within the functioning of modern state bureaucracies. Examining issues as controversial as the state of Islam in Europe and China’s encounters with religion, secularism, and modernization provides incisive and broader perspectives on how we negotiate secularism within the contemporary threats of terrorism and other forms of fundamentalism and state-politics. However, amidst the discussions of various versions of secularism in different countries and cultural contexts, this book also raises several other issues relevant to the antitheocratic and theocratic alike, such as: Is secularism is merely a nonreligious establishment? Is secularism a kind of cultural war? How is it related to "terror"? The book at once makes sense of secularism across cultural, religious, and national borders and puts several relevant issues on the anvil for further investigations and understanding.

The authors chart a middle course in our war over religion and public education, one that builds on a developing national consensus among educational and religious leaders. While it is not proper for schools to practice religion or proselytize, neither is it permissible to make them religion-free zones. Schools do not take religion seriously, as the authors' review of textbooks and the new national content standards makes clear. In Part One, they outline the civic, constitutional, and educational frameworks that should shape the treatment of religion in the curriculum and classroom.In Part Two, they explore major issues relating to religion in different domains of the curriculum in elementary education and in middle and high school courses in history, civics, economics, literature, and the sciences. They also discuss Bible courses and world religions courses and explore the relationship of religion to moral education and sex education.

This volume aims to reveal how Dewey’s notion of the religious—understood as faith in the human relational condition—offers a way to think differently about the aims and purposes of education. After exploring the effects of neoliberal conceptions of schooling against broader democratic forms of education, this book suggests that Dewey’s vision of the "teacher-as-prophet" is a useful model for positioning teachers as agents of social change. By catalysing the religious work of schools—understood not as teaching religion, but as a process of social unification—the Deweyan teacher-as-prophet can stimulate experimentation towards a democratic ideal of schooling.

A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist Most of us learn about science from media coverage, and anyone seeking factual information on climate change, vaccine safety, genetically modified foods, or the dangers of peanut allergies has to sift through an avalanche of bogus assertions, misinformation, and carefully packaged spin. Cornelia Dean draws on thirty years of experience as a science reporter at the New York Times to expose the tricks that handicap readers with little background in science. She reveals how activists, business spokespersons, religious leaders, and talk show hosts influence the way science is reported and describes the conflicts of interest that color research. At a time when facts are under daily assault, Making Sense of Science seeks to equip nonscientists with a set of critical tools to evaluate the claims and controversies that shape our lives. “Making Sense of Science explains how to decide who is an expert, how to understand data, what you need to do to read science and figure out whether someone is lying to you... If science leaves you with a headache trying to figure out what’s true, what it all means and who to trust, Dean’s book is a great place to start.” —Casper Star-Tribune “Fascinating... Its mission is to help nonscientists evaluate scientific claims, with much attention paid to studies related to health.” —Seattle Times “This engaging book offers non-scientists the tools to connect with and evaluate science, and for scientists it is a timely call to action for effective communication.” —Times Higher Education

The field of education has experienced extraordinary technological, societal, and institutional change in recent years, making it one of the most fascinating yet complex fields of study in social science. Unequalled in its combination of authoritative scholarship and comprehensive coverage, International Encyclopedia of Education, Third Edition succeeds two highly successful previous editions (1985, 1994) in aiming to encapsulate research in this vibrant field for the twenty-first century reader. Under development for five years, this work encompasses over 1,000 articles across 24 individual areas of coverage, and is expected to become the dominant resource in the field. Education is a multidisciplinary and international field drawing on a wide range of social sciences and humanities disciplines, and this new edition comprehensively matches this diversity. The diverse background and multidisciplinary subject coverage of the Editorial Board ensure a balanced and objective academic framework, with 1,500 contributors representing over 100 countries, capturing a complete portrait of this evolving field. A totally new work, revamped with a wholly new editorial board, structure and brand-new list of meta-sections and articles Developed by an international panel of editors and authors drawn from senior academia Web-enhanced with supplementary multimedia audio and video files, hotlinked to relevant references and sources for further study Incorporates ca. 1,350 articles, with timely coverage of such topics as technology and learning, demography and social change, globalization, and adult learning, to name a few Offers two content delivery options - print and online - the latter of which provides anytime, anywhere access for multiple users and superior search functionality via ScienceDirect, as well as multimedia content, including audio and video files