Research Resource Manager for the Christian Research Institute, Rancho Santa Margarita, California, from 1984 to 1995 and now editor of Apologia Report, Rich developed a popular freeware computer database called CRI TEXT. This database was principally constructed from the full text of the FYI and BBS-FYI research bulletins that Rich wrote and published in-house for CRI's research staff and used as training tools for new staff. Apologia Report continues in this tradition of providing students in Christian apologetics information on new resources in the ongoing defense of the gospel worldwide.
It's next to impossible to keep up with the massive growth of information on cults, the occult, new religious movements, world religions, spiritual trends in modern culture, and general apologetics. That's why Apologia Report, an online research journal edited by Rich Poll, updates you weekly on the latest resources available so that you can stay current in your areas of expertise.
Apologia Report summarizes and reviews hundreds of magazines, journals, and news publications to identify the most valuable resources to aid Christians as they encounter competing truth claims and seek to wisely respond. Apologia Report places summaries and source information in the hands of Christian leaders worldwide to enhance the impact of their ministries.
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Editor: Rich Poll
Contributing Editor: Paul Carden
Member: Evangelical Ministries to New Religions
CULTURE - the "deep contradictions" and "neurotic relationship" of evangelicals and American popular culture
EDUCATION - "an intellectual version of paradise"
ISLAM - yet another update on America's accommodation to sharia law
ORIGINS - why "intelligent design is a greater threat to science than creationism ever was"
WINFREY, OPRAH - latest promo, "the most exciting thing I've ever done"
In the hope of increasing subscriptions, we have reduced the number of issues of Apologia Report posted here and changed to making them available on LeaderU more infrequently.
Apologia Report 13:20
May 19, 2008
Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture, by Daniel Radosh  -- reviewer for the on-line magazine Slate, Hanna Rosin reports that Radosh mines "the deep contradictions of Christian popular culture" while describing "evangelicals' deeply neurotic relationship with popular culture." In the final analysis, "Worried that American popular culture leads people - and especially teenagers - astray, the Christian version is designed to satisfy all the same needs in a cleaner form."
Rosin cautions that "few of us have any idea of how truly extensive this so-called subculture is." She offers clear insight: "What does commercializing do to the substance of belief, and what does an infusion of belief do to the product?" And later, she identifies the plight of Christian rock musicians who "want to make good, authentic music. But they are also enlisted in a specific mission which confines their art."
Her summary example is chilling. "A Christian friend who'd grown up totally sheltered once wrote to me that the first time he heard a Top 40 station he was horrified, and not because of the racy lyrics: 'Suddenly, my lifelong suspicions became crystal clear,' he wrote. 'Christian subculture was nothing but a commercialized rip-off of the mainstream, done with wretched quality and an apocryphal insistence on the sanitization of reality.'" Slate, May 5 '08, <http://www.slate.com/id/2190482>
"Dwelling in Possibilities: Our students' spectacular hunger for life makes them radically vulnerable" by Mark Edmundson, professor of English at the University of Virginia, who considers such vulnerability a good thing. Well into this lengthy and observant essay on what passes for college life and its attendant challenges today, Edmundson presents a candid educator's purpose statement along with his methodology.
"Genuine education is a process that gives students a second chance. They've been socialized once by their parents and teachers; now it's time for a second, maybe a better, shot. It's time - to be a little idealizing about it - for Socrates to have a turn.
"For a student to be educated, she has to face brilliant antagonists. She has to encounter thinkers who see the world in different terms than she does. Does she come to college as a fundamentalist guardian of crude faith? Then two necessary books for her are Freud's Future of an Illusion  and Nietzsche's The Anti-Christ . Once she's weathered the surface insults, she may find herself in an intellectual version of paradise, where she can defend her beliefs or change them, and where what's on hand is not a chance conversation, as Socrates liked to say, but a dialogue about how to live. Is the student a scion of high-minded liberals who think that religion is the OxyContin - the redneck heroin - of Redneck Nation? Then on might come William James and The Varieties of Religious Experience  or Schopenhauer's essays on faith ." Chronicle of Higher Education, 54:27 - 2008, pB7, <http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i27/27b00701.htm>
"Amerabia" by Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. -- reviews the USA's "accommodation to totalitarian ideology known alternatively as Islamism, jihadism or Islamofascism." Gaffney describes the findings of "last year's federal trial of the Holy Land Foundation on terrorism-financing charges." It revealed the various "front organizations systematically established by the Islamist organization known as the Ikhwan, or Muslim Brotherhood." Most notable among them are: "the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC)."
Gaffney reports on the "Muslim Brotherhood's comprehensive plan to set down roots in civil society. It begins by both founding and taking control of American Muslim organizations.... [I]n the past seventeen years, the Ikhwan has succeeded beyond its wildest dreams. Groups like CAIR, ISNA and MPAC not only made great strides in what Ibrahim calls 'the common task [of] instill[ing] the notion among Arab-Americans or European immigrant communities of Muslim countries that they are not part of secular multicultural societies.' Brotherhood fronts have also penetrated and exercised enormous influence....
"The FBI allows CAIR to provide 'sensitivity training' for its agents. U.S. intelligence actively recruits at ISNA and other Ikhwan front conferences. One of ISNA's highly placed admirers, Pentagon deputy chief Gordon England's consigliere Hisham Islam, was allowed to purge the Joint Chiefs of Staff's Islamist expert, Steven Coughlin, for warning against such practices.
"Most recently, two key federal agencies the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security encouraged American officials to eschew, when describing our enemies, the use of such terms as jihadist, mujahedeen, Islamic terrorist, Islamist, holy warrior and Islamofascism." From townhall.com, May 5 '08, <http://tinyurl.com/657lan>
Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul, by Kenneth R. Miller  -- "Thoroughly enjoyable and informative, this new book by Miller (Finding Darwin's God ), a Brown University biologist and leading proponent of evolution, dismantles the scientific basis of intelligent design piece by piece. He does this by taking seriously the claims of intelligent design (though with tongue often in cheek), such as irreducible complexity, and looking at the biological facts and the dubious conclusions ID concepts would lead to. He turns to the peer-reviewed scientific literature to demonstrate that the two biological phenomena ID proponents say could not have evolved - blood-clotting proteins and bacterial flagella - are now well-enough understood to fully rebut intelligent design. Looking at the underlying philosophical issues, Miller explains that ID's proponents want to replace modern science with '"theistic science" ... that would use the Divine not as ultimate cause, but as scientific explanation.' Miller effectively explores the devastating consequences such a change would have on both science and society. In a measured, well-reasoned book, Miller explains why evolution does not deny us our humanity or our unique place in the universe." Publishers Weekly, Apr 14 '08, p46.
A later interview between Miller and Publishers Weekly staff writer Sarah Gold (Apr 28 '08, p121) reveals the following:
SG: "How would you quickly sum up the central flaw in intelligent design?"
KM: "No evidence ... the argument is, we see a feature of a biological system that evolution couldn't have produced. Therefore something else must have made it. Now that's equivalent to saying, let's suppose, you think the moon is made of green cheese. And we get soil samples back from the moon, and you know what? They're not made of granite. So I say, great, that's evidence for the green cheese theory. Well, it's not. It's an entirely negative argument."
SG: "Why do you say that intelligent design is a greater threat to science than creationism was?"
KM: "First, intelligent design is less easily identified as religious in nature. And second, it promotes a kind of relativistic interpretation of science."
The Christian Science Monitor (May 5 '08, n.p.) makes an unusual, though effective platform for Peter Jones, professor at Westminster Seminary (Escondido, CA). In "A New Earth: The Oprah-Tolle juggernaut is deeply unbiblical," Jones rebuts the latest New Age book promotion made by Winfrey: "an unprecedented, 10-week Web broadcast to discuss spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle's latest bestselling book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose  (#2 on Amazon.com as I write this - RP).
Jones explains that New Earth "claims to liberate us from old, ideological, 'I am right; you are wrong' religious beliefs. It offers a new spirituality that supposedly lies at the hidden center of all religions. ...
"The Bible and A New Earth at first seem very similar, because Tolle's teachings are often presented in a quasi-Christian framework and affirmed by Oprah as consonant with Christianity. ...
"On the issue of the nature of God and humanity, and the way of salvation, the apparent agreements give way to fundamental contradictions.
"At bottom, one approach is rooted in God's grace. The other is rooted in man's vanity.
"For Tolle, echoing the teachings of the ancient Gnostics, the chief error is ignorance of our true self. This leads to the rise of 'egoic mind patterns,' a false consciousness that causes distress. This ego also mistakenly sees as real the 'forms' and 'content' of everyday life and the distinctions we see therein: right and wrong, creature and Creator. ...
"Oprah - and her millions of followers - are accepting the rules and doctrines of another system, Tolle's Gnostic view of truth that Jesus' earliest followers warned against. No wonder so many Christians are confused." <http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0505/p09s01-coop.html>
1 - Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture, by Daniel Radosh (Scribner, 2008, hardcover, 320 pages) <http://tinyurl.com/4h7jer>
2 - The Future of an Illusion, by Sigmund Freud (W. W. Norton, 1989, paperback, 80 pages) <http://tinyurl.com/66r5gs>
3 - The Anti-Christ, by Friedrich Nietzsche (Wilder, 2008, hardcover, 108 pages) <http://tinyurl.com/6rr4tr>
4 - Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, by William James (BiblioBazaar, 2007, paperback, 458 pages) <http://tinyurl.com/5mhc5r>
5 - Religion, A Dialogue, Etc.: The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer, by Arthur Schopenhauer and T. Bailey Saunders (Kessinger, 2004, paperback, 68 pages) <http://tinyurl.com/5l6js9>
6 - Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul, by Kenneth R. Miller (Viking, 2008, hardcover, 256 pages) <http://tinyurl.com/58jqr3>
7 - Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution, by Kenneth Miller (Cliff Street Books, 2000, paperback, 338 pages) <http://tinyurl.com/5zapge>
8 - A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, by Eckhart Tolle (Penguin, 2008, paperback, 336 pages) <http://tinyurl.com/6rao9c>
... and, featured in previous issues of Apologia Report ...
Apologia Report 13:3
January 25, 2008
EVANGELICALISM - identifying distinctives between USA and UK
GNOSTICISM - Christian History magazine knocks one out of the park
MORMONISM - Romney bid spotlights ever more LDS worldview oddities
SCRIPTURE, GENERAL - contrasting global promotional efforts behind the Bible and the Koran
Apologia Report 13:4
January 31, 2008
ATHEISM - considering what lies behind the neo-atheist movement
MORMONISM - the fatal flaw of popular LDS/Evangelical comparisons
UNIVERSAL CHURCH OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD - growing influence in Brazil, the world
Apologia Report 13:5
February 7, 2008
MORMONISM - accepting the LDS, in spite of their teachings. Why? Because the movement is "composed of real people"
MYSTICISM - evangelicals and Mormons, equally prone to "open a Pandora's Box of subjectivism"?
UNITY SCHOOL OF CHRISTIANITY - sympathetic book-length overview considers criticism
Apologia Report 13:6
February 14, 2008
The attempt of evolutionary psychology to navigate moral relativism
Apologia Report 13:7
February 21, 2008
ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE - historical analysis identifies insatiable drive for existential understanding and hope for control
ISLAM - recent news about variant ancient Koranic manuscripts
RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE - bibliographic summary of books since 9/11
Apologia Report 13:8
February 26, 2008
AFRICA - unexpected twists noticed and anticipated in Nigeria's religious upheaval include a hopeful secular influence
ATHEISM - book-length response to the new atheism gains glowing praise from unexpected quarters
HINDUISM - counting Hindus in America yields surprising results
Apologia Report 13:9
March 6, 2008
ABORTION - conservative book given unbiased review in Time magazine
BIBLICAL AUTHORITY - is Peter Enns' new look at "an old problem" tainted by postmodernism?
ISLAM - the invasion of Sharia law gains momentum in Europe
KELLER, TIM - Newsweek sympathetically profiles Reason for God author
NEW RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS - Are fringe belief systems America's most successful exports?
Apologia Report 13:10
March 13, 2008
FICTION, CHRISTIAN - a new and noteworthy effort reviewed
ISLAM - adopting banking practices which follow the Koran has enabled Malaysia to gain strength
+ a helpful primer on the "caliphate debate" from U.S. News
MORMONISM - the growth of higher education's interest in the LDS
Apologia Report 13:11
March 21, 2008
ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE - "first scientific evaluation" not sympathetic
ASTROLOGY - UK researcher conducts "largest test ever undertaken"
CHOPRA, DEEPAK - author's summary of his new book, The Third Jesus, raises so many questions that even (some) non-Christians may balk
ORIGINS - diatribe against "self-deceiving evangelicals" nearly eclipses summary of "effort to contest creationism" in all fields
Apologia Report 13:12
March 28, 2008
BIOETHICS - why public opposition to animal-human hybrid experimentation continues to fade in the UK
GENDER - the youngest transsexual?
+ responding to the strategies of the transsexual lobby
+ the transgender transition in higher education
Apologia Report 13:13
April 4, 2008
ISLAM - Shariah law: its influence yesterday, today, and tomorrow
+ "Negotiating the Future" of Shariah law
MORMONISM - leading LDS historian acknowledges identity of "the fourth Abrahamic religion"
ORIGINS - "Expelled," coming to theaters April 18, playfully pits Intelligent Design underdog against science bully, Higher Education
Apologia Report 13:14
April 9, 2008
Atheists expelled from Expelled?
Apologia Report 13:15
April 18, 2008
CHURCH OF RELIGIOUS SCIENCE - relocation, name change
HAGEE, JOHN - obfuscation, conflict of interest
ISLAM - global Muslim lobby influencing United Nations policy against criticism of Islam
+ English translations of classic "turning-point texts in Islam," a "critical bibliographical survey"
LIBERALISM - "a deeper insight into the meaning and truth of Christian faith for today than all the other options"?
PSYCHOLOGY - new secular exorcism therapy "works better" than what professionals learned in medical or graduate school
Apologia Report 13:16
April 24, 2008
HAGEE, JOHN - Rolling Stone magazine issues mockery
ORIGINS - Are you sitting down? Skeptical Inquirer magazine pans the recently released film, Expelled - a nevertheless, telling review
TEMPLETON FOUNDATION - their new book promotes New Age physics
YOGA - even pluralist Hindus reject "Christian" versions of yoga
+ excellent new Christian response to the "Yoga Boom"
Apologia Report 13:17
May 2, 2008
HINDUISM - why it's often a tactical error to emphasize historical support in dialog with Hindus
NEOPAGANISM - joint review presents broad analysis of the movement
WORD-FAITH MOVEMENT - new book said to analyze influence of the "prosperity gospel" on politics
Apologia Report 13:18
May 7, 2008
ISLAM - Who speaks for moderate Islam? - a progress update
+ how advocates of cultural surrender to sharia embrace "accommodation" - a review of examples
MORMONISM - revisiting the late LDS apologist Hugh Nibley's flawed scholarship
Apologia Report 13:19
May 16, 2008
MORMONISM - New York Times minimizes difference between polygamous LDS splinter groups and main body
NEW AGE MOVEMENT - secular profile among the best ever
NEW TESTAMENT CRITICISM - This Tragic Gospel, briefly reviewed
POSTMODERNISM - "the freshest theological voice of the emerging church movement"
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