Obama’s Spiritual Cabinet
Barack Obama has turned to a group of fresh—and relatively unfamiliar—faces to manage religious issues in his administration. They are recalibrating America’s engagement with Muslims, revamping the White House faith-based office, and tending to the president’s own soul. A year into Obama’s presidency, each of these seven people has become an essential member of what might be called his “spiritual cabinet.” (Daniel Burke, Religion News Service)

Task Force of White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships Offers Recommendations
Elements of the report have heft. Especially serious and provocative are the task force’s recommendations on the subject of reforming the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships itself. Though bureaucratic and unsexy, these recommendations essentially demand that the administration clarify the muddy and inconsistent ground rules for religious groups seeking federal funds for charitable work. (Lisa Miller, Newsweek)

Stressed Men Prefer Faces of Women Dissimilar to Their Own
According to scientists, if you find yourself irresistibly drawn to someone who looks nothing like you, it may mean that you’ve been working too hard. A study published online this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B suggests that men under stress are more likely to find physically dissimilar women attractive. (Tim Wogan, ScienceNOW)

Empathy for Animals, Too
Marc Bekoff: A much-needed paradigm shift in how we view other animals and ourselves brings hope and life to our dreams for a more compassionate, empathic, fair, and peaceful planet in which social justice prevails. We can make positive change as an empathic collective that will help other animals and us. (The Huffington Post)

German Woman Tries to Shut Down Large Hadron Collider Because She Fears Apocalypse
The Federal Constitutional Court in the western Germany city of Karlsruhe threw out the woman’s appeal because she was “unable to give a coherent account of how her fears would come about.” “The overwhelming scientific opinion is that the experiments carried out at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) present no dangers,” the court ruled. (Telegraph)

Conan Follows One Person on Twitter at Random—and She Uses Her New Power for Good
Before the fateful Conan O’Brien connection, Sarah Killen and her mother had been setting up a sponsor page for the Michigan Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure for breast cancer. Mere hours afterward, Killen posted a link on Twitter to her new donation page. By the next day, she’d raised almost a thousand dollars. She’s currently closing in on 3,000 dollars. And amid the outpouring of attention, she’s emerged as a young woman of remarkable grace and gratitude. (Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon.com)

Is Science Fiction Really Humanist?
People talk about science fiction as the literature of humanism. But actually, science fiction’s explorations put it into conflict with humanism’s tenets. The best science fiction questions the nature of humanity, and whether the universe will let us stay human. (Charlie Jane Anders, io9)

www.domainnames.God
The .God domain name has been controversial, and last year, the Vatican called on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to keep religion and the Internet naming systems separate. The Pope was reported to fear that individual organizations might hijack whole domains such as .catholic or .islam. (Matt Warman, Telegraph)

Texas Textbook Battles Could Soon Have Less National Impact
Changes in Texas’ purchasing practices, a looming budget shortfall, and legislators’ efforts to wean schools off hardbound textbooks could mean that Texas—and the State Board of Education—will no longer be the arbiter of content it has been in the past. (Kate Alexander, Austin American-Statesman)

What Role Should Religion Play in Public Education?
One of the most watched races in the Texas primaries on March 2 was the Republican contest between incumbent State Board of Education member Don McLeroy and challenger Thomas Ratliff. Ratliff prevailed, in part because he campaigned on the idea that the board shouldn’t get into cultural war debates over issues like teaching evolution. (William McKenzie, Texas Faith, The Dallas Morning News)

Liberty University Students Learn Nothing From Evolution Exhibit
Each year, a group of biology students at the Christian university based in Lynchburg, Virginia, travels to the Natural History Museum in Washington to learn about a theory they dismiss as incorrect—Darwin’s theory of evolution. (Virginie Montet, Telegraph)

Q&A
Richard Stearns
As president of World Vision, Richard Stearns heads one of the largest Christian relief organizations in the world. His group has also been at the forefront of recent fights over the right of religious organizations to hire employees based on their beliefs. His background is also unusual in the faith-based, nonprofit, world. He came to World Vision after decades in a lucrative career as a corporate CEO. (William Wan, Under God, On Faith, Newsweek/The Washington Post)

BOOKS
Made for Goodness and Why This Makes All the Difference
With all the hardship in the world, it can sometimes be easy to look around and wonder if there’s any goodness. That’s why Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his daughter, the Rev. Mpho Tutu, say they wrote their new book called Made For Goodness. They say that joy and goodness can be found anywhere, if we would only look for it. (Good Morning America, ABC News)

Competition Asked What Message We Should Send to Outer Space
We were vaguely expecting the entries to be uplifting and spiritual—messages of interstellar peace and love, that sort of thing. But how wrong we were! Almost 1,000 suggestions came flooding in from all over the globe, but they painted a picture of a planet that is such a miserable place to be that you wouldn’t blame ET for legging it back to his distant star. (Robert Colvile, Telegraph)

More on Sacred Values
Adam Waytz: What truly distinguishes sacred values from secular ones is how people behave when asked to compromise them. When people are asked to trade their sacred values for values considered to be secular—what psychologist Philip Tetlock refers to as a “taboo tradeoff”—they exhibit moral outrage, express anger and disgust, become increasingly inflexible in negotiations, and display an insensitivity to a strict cost-benefit analysis of the exchange. (Scientific American)

Rick Santorum’s Stance on the Teaching of Evolution
If Rick Santorum actually believes what he says about his own religious beliefs, that “A Catholic is required to form his conscience in accordance with the church’s teachings,” I guess he will be changing his stance on the teaching of evolution, and I can think of no better place to make a public pronouncement on the topic than to the Iowa Christian Alliance. After all, the teachings of his church are crystal clear on the issue. (Michael Zimmerman, The Huffington Post)

World Bank Hopes Online Game Will Empower Africa
The Urgent Evoke game—classified in the emerging “alternate reality” genre—straddles the online and physical worlds. Players, a few hundred of whom are in Africa, earn points and power-ups by completing real-world tasks like volunteering, making business contacts, or researching an issue, then submitting evidence of their work online. At the end of the game, designer Jane McGonigal expects some players to have business plans about how they will improve the world. (John Sutter, CNN)

“Faith-Healing” Parents Each Get 16 Months in Prison
The judge who sentenced the Oregon couple to prison for the death of their son says members of their church must quit relying on faith healing when their children’s lives are at stake. “The fact is, too many children have died unnecessarily—a graveyard full,” Judge Steven Maurer said. “This has to stop.” (Abby Haight, Associated Press)

Study Finds Happy People Have More Meaningful Conversations
The happiest participants spent 25 percent less time alone and 70 percent more time talking than the unhappiest participants. The happiest participants also had twice as many substantive conversations and one-third as much small talk as the unhappiest participants. The findings, to be detailed in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, suggest that happy lives are social and conversationally deep rather than solitary and superficial. The researchers think that deep conversations may have the potential to make people happier, though the findings from this study don’t identify cause and effect between the two. (LiveScience)

Sarah Palin Is Writing a Book on Her Spiritual Values
Republican star Sarah Palin will write a new book reflecting her patriotic and “spiritual” values, publisher HarperCollins announced. The conservative former governor of Alaska and vice presidential candidate will pen “a celebration of American virtues and strengths,” HarperCollins said in a statement. (Agence France-Presse)

Top-Selling Home-School Biology Textbooks Get an F
“The majority of home-schoolers self-identify as evangelical Christians,” said Ian Slatter, a spokesman for the Home School Legal Defense Association. “Most home-schoolers will definitely have a sort of creationist component to their home-school program.” Those who don’t, however, often feel isolated and frustrated from trying to find a textbook that fits their beliefs. Two of the best-selling biology textbooks stack the deck against evolution, said some science educators who reviewed sections of the books. (Dylan Lovan, Associated Press)

Growing Consensus the “Hobbit” Is a Separate Species
Her scientific name is Homo floresiensis, her nickname is “the hobbit,” and the hunt is on to prove that she and the dozen other hobbits since discovered are not a quirk of nature but members of a distinct hominid species. (Michael Casey, Associated Press)

Crying Is Human
If emotional tears are indeed a uniquely human phenomenon, there must be an evolutionary advantage to crying, and possibly, a big one. But what? Does crying signal submission and thus disarm aggressors? Does it increase empathy and bonding, promoting community? Do tears promote health by relieving stress, giving a survival advantage to the weepy? What is it about the human brain that creates this ability to cry? Relatively little study has been done on the subject, though some researchers are plunging in, with fascinating results. (Judy Foreman, The Boston Globe)

Mass-Market Mysticism
In a sense, Americans seem to have done with mysticism what we’ve done with every other kind of human experience: We’ve democratized it, diversified it, and taken it mass market. No previous society has offered seekers so many different ways to chase after nirvana, so many different paths to unity with God or Gaia or Whomever. (Ross Douthat, The New York Times)

Cultural Evolution
Michael Ruse: If, like me, you are with Darwin, seeing humans as unambiguously natural and wanting to locate us and our origins firmly within orthodox evolutionary theory, you still have got to recognize that we are rather special animals. Without denying that there are traces of it in other species, and certainly without denying that we have it because overall it is (or was) of adaptive advantage, our culture does set us apart. How then are you to deal with it in an evolutionary context? (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

Does the Next Supreme Court Nominee Have to Be a Protestant?
If Justice John Paul Stevens decides to call it a career after he turns 90 next month, the Supreme Court would for the first time in its history be without a justice belonging to America’s largest religious affiliations. Perhaps that would mean only that religion is no longer important in the mix of experience and expertise that a president seeks in a Supreme Court nominee. (Robert Barnes, The Washington Post)