The Immanent Frame

The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports that efforts to repeal the 2008 Science Education Act have failed despite efforts by Louisiana Senator Karen Carter and affidavits from “43 Nobel laureates, faculty members and administrators from Louisiana State University and LSU’s Pennington Biomedical Research Center, and a host of state and national organizations of scientists and educators.”

St. Louis Rams wide receiver Mark Clayton is keeping busy during the NFL lockout with MyChristianT.com a side business that combines fashion, faith and social networking. Calling himself a “christianpreneur”  in this video from NBC News Dallas-Fort Worth, his line includes Team Jesus hoodies for men and women and t-shirts with phrases like I Twitter Jesus.

The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at NYU has recently launched States of Devotion, a trilingual blog serving as “an interactive forum for news, analysis and opinion-making about religion and politics in the Americas.”

Yesterday morning saw the removal of David Wojnarowicz’s 1987 video A Fire in My Belly from the National Portrait Gallery’s “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” exhibition.  This video (which can be viewed here) was deemed controversial for an eleven second clip of ants crawling across a small crucifix.

Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear announced today that the planned creationist theme park Ark Encounter, set to open in 2014, will have a $250 million annual economic impact. “Make no mistake about it, this is a huge deal,” he told the Louisville Courier-Journal.

An interesting article by Joe Friesen and Sandra Martin on secularism and multiculturalism in Canada appeared in The Globe and Mail earlier this month.

“Deep inside the computer worm that some specialists suspect is aimed at slowing Iran’s race for a nuclear weapon lies what could be a fleeting reference to the Book of Esther,” reports The New York Times.

A software engineer with the National Center for Atmospheric Research believes that the parting of the Red Sea recorded in Exodus may have been caused by a meteorological phenomenon known as “wind set-down,” reports NPR.

Much ink, real and digital, has been spent on the closing of the Marina Abramović retrospective The Artist is Present. “But,” writes Alisa Solomon in a thoughtful piece at Killing the Buddha, “for all the ecstatic attention—and cranky critiques, too—trained on the art world’s equivalent of an audience with the pope, an important aspect of the performance has been overlooked: the deep aesthetic, communal, even spiritual (and sometimes contentious) experiences of hundreds of people who waited all day along the perimeter of the square performance space in vain hopes of taking a turn in the chair.”

This Thursday, Get Mad at Sin! opens at The Chocolate Factory in Long Island City. Conceived and performed by Andrew Dinwiddie and directed by Jeff Larson, Get Mad At Sin! is based on a 1971 record of evangelist Jimmy Swaggart recorded at the First Assembly of God in Van Buren, Arkansas. It is both historical document and portrait of Swaggart in his element before his televised rise to fame.