Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science & Religion

When the police arrived at Bradley Waldroup's trailer home in the mountains of Tennessee, they found a war zone. There was blood on the walls, blood on the carpet, blood on the truck outside, even blood on the Bible that Waldroup had been reading before all hell broke loose.

Assistant District Attorney Drew Robinson says that on Oct. 16, 2006, Waldroup was waiting for his estranged wife to arrive with their four kids for the weekend. He had been drinking, and when his wife said she was leaving with her friend, Leslie Bradshaw, they began to fight. Soon, Waldroup had shot Bradshaw eight times and sliced her head open with a sharp object. When Waldroup was finished with her, he chased after his wife, Penny, with a machete, chopping off her finger and cutting her over and over.

"There are murders and then there are ... hacking to death, trails of blood," says prosecutor Cynthia Lecroy-Schemel. "I have not seen one like this. And I have done a lot."

Prosecutors charged Waldroup with the felony murder of Bradshaw, which carries the death penalty, and attempted first-degree murder of his wife. It seemed clear to them that Waldroup's actions were intentional and premeditated.

"There were numerous things he did around the crime scene that were conscious choices," Lecroy-Schemel says. "One of them was [that] he told his children to 'come tell your mama goodbye,' because he was going to kill her. And he had the gun, and he had the machete."

It was a pretty straightforward case. Even Waldroup said so during his trial last year. He said on the murderous night, he just "snapped," and he admitted that he killed Leslie Bradshaw and attacked his wife. "I'm not proud of none of it," Waldroup said.

"It wasn't a who done it?" says defense attorney Wylie Richardson. "It was a why done it?"

Kent Kiehl has studied hundreds of psychopaths. Kiehl is one of the world's leading investigators of psychopathy and a professor at the University of New Mexico. He says he can often see it in their eyes: There's an intensity in their stare, as if they're trying to pick up signals on how to respond. But the eyes are not an element of psychopathy, just a clue.

Officially, Kiehl scores their pathology on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, which measures traits such as the inability to feel empathy or remorse, pathological lying, or impulsivity.

"The scores range from zero to 40," Kiehl explains in his sunny office overlooking a golf course. "The average person in the community, a male, will score about 4 or 5. Your average inmate will score about 22. An individual with psychopathy is typically described as 30 or above. Brian scored 38.5 basically. He was in the 99th percentile."

"Brian" is Brian Dugan, a man who is serving two life sentences for rape and murder in Chicago. Last July, Dugan pleaded guilty to raping and murdering 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico in 1983, and he was put on trial to determine whether he should be executed. Kiehl was hired by the defense to do a psychiatric evaluation.

Kiehl with the brain scanner he uses at prisons. He has scanned the brains of more than 1,100 inmates, about 20 percent of whom are psychopaths.(Barbara Bradley Hagerty)

In a videotaped interview with Kiehl, Dugan describes how he only meant to rob the Nicaricos' home. But then he saw the little girl inside.

"She came to the door and ... I clicked," Dugan says in a flat, emotionless voice. "I turned into Mr. Hyde from Dr. Jekyll."

On screen, Dugan is dressed in an orange jumpsuit. He seems calm, even normal -- until he lifts his hands to take a sip of water and you see the handcuffs. Dugan is smart -- his IQ is over 140 -- but he admits he has always had shallow emotions. He tells Kiehl that in his quarter century in prison, he believes he's developed a sense of remorse.

"And I have empathy, too -- but it's like it just stops," he says. "I mean, I start to feel, but something just blocks it. I don't know what it is."

Kiehl says he's heard all this before: All psychopaths claim they feel terrible about their crimes for the benefit of the parole board.

The criminal brain has always held a fascination for James Fallon. For nearly 20 years, the neuroscientist at the University of California-Irvine has studied the brains of psychopaths. He studies the biological basis for behavior, and one of his specialties is to try to figure out how a killer's brain differs from yours and mine.

About four years ago, Fallon made a startling discovery. It happened during a conversation with his then 88-year-old mother, Jenny, at a family barbecue.

"I said, 'Jim, why don't you find out about your father's relatives?' " Jenny Fallon recalls. "I think there were some cuckoos back there."

Fallon investigated.

"There's a whole lineage of very violent people -- killers," he says.

One of his direct great-grandfathers, Thomas Cornell, was hanged in 1667 for murdering his mother. That line of Cornells produced seven other alleged murderers, including Lizzy Borden. "Cousin Lizzy," as Fallon wryly calls her, was accused (and controversially acquitted) of killing her father and stepmother with an ax in Fall River, Mass., in 1882.

A little spooked by his ancestry, Fallon set out to see whether anyone in his family possesses the brain of a serial killer. Because he has studied the brains of dozens of psychopaths, he knew precisely what to look for. To demonstrate, he opened his laptop and called up an image of a brain on his computer screen.

"Here is a brain that's not normal," he says. There are patches of yellow and red. Then he points to another section of the brain, in the front part of the brain, just behind the eyes.

"Look at that -- there's almost nothing here," Fallon says.

This is the orbital cortex, the area that Fallon and other scientists believe is involved with ethical behavior, moral decision-making and impulse control.

"People with low activity [in the orbital cortex] are either free-wheeling types or sociopaths," he says.

Fallon's Scans

He's clearly oversimplifying, but Fallon says the orbital cortex puts a brake on another part of the brain called the amygdala, which is involved with aggression and appetites. But in some people, there's an imbalance -- the orbital cortex isn't doing its job -- perhaps because the person had a brain injury or was born that way.

Last November, a 27-year-old woman was admitted to St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix. She was 11 weeks pregnant with her fifth child, and she was gravely ill. According to a hospital document, she had "right heart failure," and her doctors told her that if she continued with the pregnancy, her risk of mortality was "close to 100 percent."

The patient, who was too ill to be moved to the operating room much less another hospital, agreed to an abortion. But there was a complication: She was at a Catholic hospital.

"They were in quite a dilemma," says Lisa Sowle Cahill, who teaches Catholic theology at Boston College. "There was no good way out of it. The official church position would mandate that the correct solution would be to let both the mother and the child die. I think in the practical situation that would be a very hard choice to make."

But the hospital felt it could proceed because of an exception — called Directive 47 in the U.S. Catholic Church's ethical guidelines for health care providers — that allows, in some circumstance, procedures that could kill the fetus to save the mother. Sister Margaret McBride, who was an administrator at the hospital as well as its liaison to the diocese, gave her approval.

The woman survived. When Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted heard about the abortion, he declared that McBride was automatically excommunicated — the most serious penalty the church can levy.

"She consented in the murder of an unborn child," says the Rev. John Ehrich, the medical ethics director for the Diocese of Phoenix. "There are some situations where the mother may in fact die along with her child. But — and this is the Catholic perspective — you can't do evil to bring about good. The end does not justify the means."

Ehrich adds that under canon or church law, the nun should be expelled from her order, the Sisters of Mercy, unless the order can find an alternative penalty. Ehrich concedes that the circumstances of this case were "hard."

"But there are certain things that we don't really have a choice" about, he says. "You know, if it's been done and there's public scandal, the bishop has to take care of that, because he has to say, 'Look, this can't happen.' "

A Double Standard?

But according to the Rev. Thomas Doyle, a canon lawyer, the bishop "clearly had other alternatives than to declare her excommunicated." Doyle says Olmsted could have looked at the situation, realized that the nun faced an agonizing choice and shown her some mercy. He adds that this case highlights a "gross inequity" in how the church chooses to handle scandal.

National Public Radio correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty explores the quest to find actual physical evidence of God in her book, "Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality." Hagerty spoke about her book as part of Minnesota Public Radio's Broadcast Journalist series.

ast month, atheists marked Blasphemy Day at gatherings around the world, and celebrated the freedom to denigrate and insult religion.

Some offered to trade pornography for Bibles. Others de-baptized people with hair dryers. And in Washington, D.C., an art exhibit opened that shows, among other paintings, one entitled Divine Wine, where Jesus, on the cross, has blood flowing from his wound into a wine bottle.

Another, Jesus Paints His Nails, shows an effeminate Jesus after the crucifixion, applying polish to the nails that attach his hands to the cross.

"I wouldn't want this on my wall," says Stuart Jordan, an atheist who advises the evidence-based group Center for Inquiry on policy issues. The Center for Inquiry hosted the art show.

Jordan says the exhibit created a firestorm from offended believers, and he can understand why. But, he says, the controversy over this exhibit goes way beyond Blasphemy Day. It's about the future of the atheist movement — and whether to adopt the "new atheist" approach — a more aggressive, often belittling posture toward religious believers.

Some call it a schism.

"It's really a national debate among people with a secular orientation about how far do we want to go in promoting a secular society through emphasizing the 'new atheism,' " Jordan says. "And some are very much for it, and some are opposed to it on the grounds that they feel this is largely a religious country, and if it's pushed the wrong way, this is going to insult many of the religious people who should be shown respect even if we don't agree with them on all issues."

Jordan believes the new approach will backfire.

A Schism?

Jordan is a volunteer at the center and therefore could speak his mind. But interviews for this story with others associated with the Washington, D.C., office were canceled — a curious development for a group that promotes free speech.

A few years ago, I witnessed two great British scientists in a showdown. Nine other journalists and I were on a Templeton fellowship at Cambridge University, and on this particular morning, the guest speaker was John Barrow. Almost as an aside to his talk, the Cambridge mathematician asserted that the astonishing precision of the universe was evidence for "divine action." At that, Richard Dawkins, the Oxford biologist and famous atheist, nearly leapt from his seat.

"But why would you want to look for evidence of divine action?" demanded Dawkins.

"For the same reason someone might not want to," Barrow responded with a little smile.

For the past century, science has largely discarded "God" as a delusion and proclaimed that all our "spiritual" moments, events, thoughts, even free will, can be explained through material means.

But a revolution is occurring in science. It is called neurotheology, and it is sparked by researchers from universities such as Pennsylvania, Virginia and UCLA. Armed with technology Freud never dreamed of, these scientists are peering into the brain to understand spiritual experience. Perhaps, they say, God is not a figment of our brain chemistry; perhaps the brain chemistry reflects an encounter with the divine.

In that instant, I thought, there it is. God is a choice. You can look at the evidence and see life unfolding as a wholly material process,

NPR's Barbara Bradley Hagerty spent a year exploring the science of spirituality for her book Fingerprints of God, and what she concluded was that science can't prove or disprove the existence of God.

"But there was something that I saw in interviewing dozens of scientists," Bradley Hagerty tells NPR's Michele Norris. "The science of spirituality is like a Rorschach test — that you can look at the evidence and come to opposite conclusions."

Bradley Hagerty says that a materialist would say a spiritual experience is just brain chemistry — or firings in the temporal lobe of the brain — and it's all explainable by material means. But someone else could look at the same evidence and say that people are wired to be able to connect with the divine and that brain chemistry is a reflection of an encounter.

Bradley Hagerty says she could have taken 10 more years to research the book.

"One of the great pleasures was interviewing people who have had spiritual experiences; it's not just the scientists," she says, adding she talked with Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, people who were spiritual but not religious. "One of the interesting things is what they described as a spiritual experience was basically the same: An encounter with light, an encounter with love, often an out-of-body experience. What that told me is spiritual experience is spiritual experience — it's a human phenomenon and in fact, it may be divine."

(Fifth of a five-part series)

We've all heard the stories about near-death experiences: the tunnel, the white light, the encounter with long-dead relatives now looking very much alive. Scientists have cast a skeptical eye on these accounts. They say that these feelings and visions are simply the result of a brain shutting down. But now some researchers are giving a closer neurological look at near-death experiences and asking: Can your mind operate when your brain has stopped?

'I Popped Up Out The Top Of My Head'

I met Pam Reynolds in her tour bus. She's a big deal in the music world — her company, Southern Tracks, has recorded music by everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Pearl Jam to REM. But you've probably never heard her favorite song. It's the one Reynolds wrote about the time she traveled to death's door and back. The experience has made her something of a rock star in the near-death world. Believers say she is proof positive that the mind can operate when the brain is stilled. Nonbelievers say she's nothing of the sort.

Reynolds' journey began one hot August day in 1991.

"I was in Virginia Beach, Va., with my husband," she recalls. "We were promoting a new record. And I inexplicably forgot how to talk. I've got a big mouth. I never forget how to talk."

An MRI revealed an aneurysm on her brain stem. It was already leaking, a ticking time bomb. Her doctor in Atlanta said her best hope was a young brain surgeon at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Arizona named Robert Spetzler.

"The aneurysm was very large, which meant the risk of rupture was also very large," Spetzler says. "And it was in a location where the only way to really give her the very best odds of fixing it required what we call 'cardiac standstill.' "

It was a daring operation: Chilling her body, draining the blood out of her head like oil from a car engine, snipping the aneurysm and then bringing her back from the edge of death. "She is as deeply comatose as you can be and still be alive," Spetzler observes.

Ninety percent of Americans say they pray — for their health, or their love life or their final exams. But does prayer do any good?

For decades, scientists have tried to test the power of prayer and positive thinking, with mixed results. Now some scientists are fording new — and controversial — territory.

Mind Over Body

When I first meet Sheri Kaplan, she is perched on a plastic chair at a Miami clinic, holding out her arm as a researcher draws several vials of blood.

"I'm quite excited about my blood work this time," she says. "I've got no stress and I'm proud of it."

Kaplan is tanned and freckled, with wavy red hair and a cocky laugh. She is defiantly healthy for a person who has lived with HIV for the past 15 years.

"God didn't want me to die or even get sick," she asserts. "I've never had any opportunistic infections, because I had no time to be down."

Kaplan's faith is unorthodox, but it's central to her life. She was raised Jewish, and although she claims no formal religion now, she prays and meditates every day. She believes God is keeping the virus at bay and that her faith is the reason she's alive

Scientists are making the first attempts to understand spiritual experience — and what happens in the brains and bodies of people who believe they connect with the divine.

The field is called "neurotheology," and although it is new, it's drawing prominent researchers in the U.S. and Canada. Scientists have found that the brains of people who spend untold hours in prayer and meditation are different.

I met Scott McDermott five years ago, while covering a Pentecostal revival meeting in Toronto. It was pandemonium. People were speaking in tongues and barking like dogs. I thought, "What is a United Methodist minister, with a Ph.D. in New Testament theology, doing here?"

Then McDermott told me about a vision he had had years earlier.

"I saw fire dancing on my eyelids," he recalled, staring into the middle distance. "I felt God say to me, 'You be the oil, and I'll be the flame.' Then [I] began to feel waves of the Spirit flow through my body."

I never forgot McDermott. When I heard that scientists were studying the brains of people who spent countless hours in prayer and meditation, I thought, "I've got to see what's going on in Scott McDermott's head."

According to polls, there's a 50-50 chance you have had at least one spiritual experience — an overpowering feeling that you've touched God, or another dimension of reality.

So, have you ever wondered whether those encounters actually happened — or whether they were all in your head? Scientists say the answer might be both.

If you're looking for evidence that religion is in your head, you need look no further than Jeff Schimmel. The 49-year-old Los Angeles writer was raised in a Conservative Jewish home. But he never bought into God — until after he was touched by a being outside of himself.

"Yeah," Schimmel says, "I was touched by a surgeon."

About a decade ago, Schimmel had a benign tumor removed from his left temporal lobe. The surgery was a snap. But soon after that — unknown to him — he began to suffer mini-seizures. He'd hear conversations in his head. Sometimes the people around him would look slightly unreal, as if they were animated.

Then came the visions. He remembers twice, lying in bed, he looked up at the ceiling and saw a swirl of blue and gold and green colors that gradually settled into a shape. He couldn't figure out what it was.

"And then, like a flash, it dawned on me: 'This is the Virgin Mary!' " he says. "And you know, it's funny. I laughed about it, because why would the Virgin Mary appear to me, a Jewish guy, lying in bed looking at the ceiling? She could do much better."

For much of the 20th century, mainstream science shied away from studying spirituality.

Sigmund Freud declared God to be a delusion, and others maintained that God, if there is such a thing, is beyond the tools of science to measure.

But now, some researchers are using new technologies to try to understand spiritual experience. They're peering into our brains and studying our bodies to look for circumstantial evidence of a spiritual world. The search is in its infancy, and scientists doubt they will ever be able to prove — or disprove — the existence of God.

Peyote Healing

The search for that answer led me to my first peyote ceremony, on a mountaintop on the Navajo reservation at Lukachukai, Ariz.

While Fred Harvey, an 87-year-old roadman, or high priest, warmed up his voice, members of his family prepared the peyote, a cactus that induces visions when ingested. Using peyote to touch the spiritual world has been central to the Navajo religion for hundreds of years.

Andy Harvey, a ceremony participant, said peyote serves as a mediator between the human world and the divine.

"Sometimes we ask the peyote to help us cleanse the illnesses away and cleanse our mental being, our spiritual being," he said. "And we believe that's what peyote does, too. That's why we call it a sacrament, a sacred herb."

I spent a year exploring the emerging science of spirituality for my book, Fingerprints of God. One of the questions raised by my reporting: Is an encounter with God merely a chemical reaction?

Peyote Healing

The search for that answer led me to my first peyote ceremony, on a mountaintop on the Navajo reservation at Lukachukai, Ariz.

While Fred Harvey, an 87-year-old roadman, or high priest, warmed up his voice, members of his family prepared the peyote, a cactus that induces visions when ingested. Using peyote to touch the spiritual world has been central to the Navajo religion for hundreds of years.

The Holy Grail for near-death researchers is a physical marker, like a stamp in a passport that testifies that Mrs. Brown crossed into sacred territory and returned. In thirty years of focused research, scientists have never located such a marker. Perhaps a marker exists, perhaps it doesn't — but until recently, scientists lacked both the technology and the funding to even try.

Neurologist Peter Fenwick believes those markers do lie somewhere in the folds of the brain or the rhythm of its electrical current. Any major neurological event registers in the brain and then manifests itself in behavior. The brain images of people with post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, show cerebral changes.

"So it's likely that people who have a transcendent experience will also have changes in their brain as well," Fenwick speculated. "This is shown really because they then have changes in behavior. With post-traumatic stress, it's increased anxiety. In near-death experiences, it tends to be more social awareness, more spirituality, and so on. So these will in fact be accompanied by some cerebral markers. I'm sure we'll find them when we start looking for them."

Which brings us to the University of Montreal, where the hunt for a spiritual marker is in full cry.

Jorge Medina winced slightly as I shook his hand in the entryway of the University of Montreal Medical Center. We exchanged halting hellos — Jorge in his shy, stuttered English, his third language, after Spanish and French. I searched his face for some signature of trauma, and found wide brown eyes, a hearty black mustache, a face smooth and coppery and completely unmarred.

I unclasped Jorge's hand, and let my gaze fall to his forearm. There lay a tapestry of mottled brown-and-white skin, as shiny and inflexible as vinyl. His arm was a partial road map of his journey through the flames. Fire had left ninety percent of Jorge's body with third-degree burns, mercifully leaving his face unscathed.

I would like to say I left the faith of my childhood for exclusively noble reasons. While it is true that I made the final break with Christian Science because I was drawn to a simpler, "mere Christianity," as C.S. Lewis described it, what initially beckoned me from the faith was Tylenol.

As a Christian Scientist, I had been taught that prayer and disciplined thinking had the power to alter my experience, whether that was my wracking cough or my employment status, my mood or my love life. I had witnessed many physical healings as a child, and by the age of 34, I had never visited the doctor (except to set a broken bone) never popped a vitamin, never swallowed an aspirin or taken a swig of cough medicine.

But on one frigid winter day in 1994, I came down with the flu. I slipped in and out of consciousness all afternoon, but in a moment of lucidity I envisioned the medicine cabinet above the bathroom sink. At that moment, what flashed in my mind's eye like a blinking neon sign was Tylenol, Tylenol, Tylenol. A friend of mine, I recalled, had left some Tylenol during a visit.

I slipped out of bed and staggered to the medicine cabinet. Before I could stop myself, I downed one tablet, closed the cabinet, and stumbled quickly back to bed. Five minutes passed. My teeth stopped chattering. Another minute or so, I began to feel quite warm, no, hot, hot, what was I doing under all these covers? I felt the fever physically recede like a wave at low tide, and thought, Wow, I feel terrific!

It would take me another 16 months before I would leave the religion of my childhood for good for theological reasons. But I lost something - namely, a way to prove God. Christian Scientists believe that the ultimate evidence for God lay in answered prayers and physical healings - but I no longer counted that as evidence. After all, science has shown the mechanism by which a person's thoughts can affect his body - it has the felicitous name, psychoneuroimmunology, and it has no need for God. Others are looking to quantum mechanics to explain - oh so controversially - why one person's prayers might have an effect on another person's body. God's presence is not required there, either.

I was sitting in a small examination room at Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital when the question hit me with the force of a tank: Is the brain a radio, or a CD player? Not an elegant question, surely, but it has nipped at my heels for the past three years.

The conundrum offered itself as I was interviewing a man named Terrence Ayala at the hospital’s epilepsy clinic. Several years earlier, Ayala had undergone an operation that left him with a stuttering problem, and more. Often when falling asleep, but other times as well, he would sense a “dark presence,” usually looming over him, as real and tangible as the chair he was sitting on.

The neurologists at Henry Ford suspected Ayala’s surgery had left scarring on his brain, which had eventually resulted in temporal lobe epilepsy. And in fact the epilepsy medications he had taken over the past few months had eviscerated this “sensed presence.” But rather than relief, Ayala told me he felt robbed—as if someone had dismantled his bridge to the spiritual realm.

“We have a habit of trying to bring people into conformity through medication and modern science and all kinds of things,” he observed. “Who knows what realities we’re medicating away?”

This begged another question in my mind: Are transcendent experiences—not just Terrence Ayala’s, but also Teresa of Ávila’s—merely a physiological event, or does the brain activity reflect an encounter with another dimension? This is where the CD vs. radio debate begins. Reductionists think that the brain is like a CD player. The content—the song, for example—is playing in a closed system, and if you take a hammer to the machine, then it’s impossible to hear the song. No God exists outside the brain trying to communicate; all spiritual experience is inside the brain, and when you destroy that, God and spirituality die as well.

There is some support for this line of thinking. For like magicians with their trick rabbits, scientists can now make these transcendent “realities” appear or disappear at will. Recently, a group of Swiss researchers evaluated a twenty-two-year-old woman for possible brain surgery. She had no psychiatric history. The researchers were homing in on a particular spot in the brain—the junction of the temporal lobes (thought to be the seat of the emotional self) and the parietal lobes (the area that orients your body in space and in relation to other objects). When the researchers electrically stimulated that area, the patient felt the presence of another person behind her. When they increased the voltage, she saw the “person” was young, of indeterminate sex, a “shadow” who did not speak or move. In the next stimulation, she observed a “man” sitting behind her, clasping her in his arms, which, she allowed, was somewhat unpleasant.

Henry Green is a rarity among Southern Baptists. The pastor of Heritage Baptist church in Annapolis, Md., is openly skeptical that the Bible is the literal word of God, that the Earth was created in a few thousand years, and that Adam and Eve were created from dirt.

He says that for too long, conservatives have tried to reconcile faith and science by throwing out science.

This weekend, nearly 1,000 clerics worldwide will proclaim their belief that science and religion can coexist as they celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin during events on what has become known as Evolution Weekend.

Believing In God And Science

"Fundamentalists want to take people away from real science and put on some sort of bogus discussion about intelligent design or creationism," Green says. "Well, guess what? I believe God created. But I just happen to believe that the scientists have it right in understanding that creation."

His views haven't made him popular among his fellow ministers. He recalls that when one colleague heard about his views, he began to "witness" to Green.

"He felt like maybe I wasn't a Christian," Green says, laughing. "And he said, 'Well, Henry, if you change your mind, you'd have a lot of friends.' And I looked at him and said, 'Jim, I don't need your friendship that bad.'"

Green says he views Genesis as truth — about God as creator — but not as historical fact.

Jewish Participation

Green is the kind of clergyman Michael Zimmerman has been seeking. The biologist and dean at Butler University in Indiana organized Evolution Weekend four years ago to show that many clergy embrace science.

"With clergy weighing in, it should become clear that the issue is not a fight between religion and science," Zimmerman says, "but that most religious leaders were on the same side as the scientists. And the fight was between different religious groups."

This year, Jews have joined the Evolution Weekend mission. David Oler, the rabbi at Congregation Beth Or, a reform synagogue in Illinois, wrote a letter in July inviting rabbis to oppose creationism in schools. Oler says there is the same kind of split over Darwin within Judaism, though he says because Judaism has a tradition of interpreting stories in a variety of ways, Orthodox Jews have an easier time reconciling Genesis with evolution than do Evangelical Christians.

The day is sunny and hot, the hamburgers are on the grill, the kids are jumping on the moon bounce and about 400 people are milling around the brand new Dar Al Noor mosque in Manassas, Va.

Neighbors and members of the congregation are here — even Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine is coming. James Dade, a non-Muslim who lives nearby, is manning the grill. As he hands a burger to a Muslim friend, he turns and gives this assessment of his new neighbors.

"They're very friendly, very helpful, very community-oriented," he says, noting that his best friend attends Dar Al Noor. "If there were more Christians like my friend, we wouldn't have any problems in this world."

It is a happy appraisal on this happy Sunday afternoon in July — the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new mosque. Sheikh Rashid Lamptey, the new imam, can barely contain his excitement as he waits for the governor to arrive.

Lamptey is serving a growing mosque in one of America's fastest-rising religions — with more than 2 million faithful to date. The imam plays a dual role: He's the face of Islam to his congregation and to Americans who might be wary of Muslims.

"Look!" says Lamptey, who is slim with dark skin, in contrast to his white robes and a perpetual grin on his face. "Everyone is here: the politicians, the security men, the people who protect us. We have their trust, they have our trust. This is what we want to establish — the trust, so we can work together towards a more peaceful community."

A few moments later, the imam introduces Kaine. The governor greets the crowd in Arabic, eliciting applause from his Muslim onlookers, then speaks about America as the bastion of religious

The Israeli government has taken the unusual step of cutting all ties with an American preacher, the television evangelist Pat Robertson. The move came after Robertson's comments last week about the massive stroke suffered by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who remains gravely ill. Robertson has been working to set up a massive Christian tourism center in Israel, and that deal is now in question. Robertson's statement is the latest in a string of pronouncements that have left Robertson isolated from other conservative Christians.

The opening salvo in the next battle over intelligent design has been fired. Coming off a major legal victory in Pennsylvania last month, opponents of intelligent design are seeking to replicate that win in California. Last month, a federal judge in Harrisburg, Pa., ruled that intelligent design cannot be taught in public school science class as an alternative to evolutionary theory. Intelligent design posits that life is too complex to have evolved through random mutation, but must have been guided by an "intelligence."

While debate rages in this country over teaching science and so-called "intelligent design," the Roman Catholic Church is in the midst of a renewed discussion over the compatibility of evolution and faith.

A federal judge Tuesday prohibited mentions of intelligent design in Dover, Pa., public school biology classes. The case was closely watched by school districts around the country, and the decision is likely to put a damper on other such efforts.

A federal judge strikes down a policy in the Dover, Pa., schools that required biology students to hear a statement supporting alternatives to evolution. The ruling is a major blow to backers of intelligent design in public schools. They say life is too complex to have evolved entirely through natural means. But in strong language, the judge said the school board's policy was a thinly veiled attempt to force religion into the teaching of science -- and therefore unconstitutional.

A federal judge in Pennsylvania is expected to rule in a case about whether ninth-grade biology students in Dover, Pa., could hear intelligent design mentioned in the classroom. At issue is whether public schools can teach alternatives to evolution.

Steve Inskeep discusses the current state of intelligent design in American classrooms with Barbara Bradley Hagerty and with Greg Allen, who covered the intelligent design movement in Kansas.

After publishing an article backing intelligent design, a scientist is targeted for retaliation. Intelligent design—the idea that life is too complex to have evolved through Darwinian evolution—is stirring up controversy not only in high school classrooms but also at universities and scientific research centers. Richard Sternberg, a staff scientist at the National Institutes of Health, is puzzled to find himself in the middle of a broader clash between religion and science—in popular culture, academia and politics.

A federal trial begins Monday in Harrisburg, Pa., over a Dover school district disclaimer that introduces the idea of "intelligent design" in high school biology classes. It is the first major test of the issue in a federal court.

The teaching of evolution fuels a dispute over modern approaches to the topic in Cecil County, Md., The case comes as historians note the 80th anniversary of the Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tenn.

Owen Gingerich, a professor of astronomy at Harvard University and senior astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, discusses the role of evolution and the creationist movement called Intelligent Design. Gingerich, a Christian, says he has a problem with Intelligent Design taught as an alternative to evolution.