The Vatican’s newspaper has rejected the science of intelligent design, according to an article by Stacy Meichtry in Thursday’s RNS report: The Vatican’s official newspaper has published an article that dismisses the scientific validity of intelligent design and endorses a recent court ruling in Pennsylvania to keep the theory out of classrooms. Writing in the Jan. 17 edition of L’Osservatore Romano, Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, Italy, accused proponents of intelligent design of improperly blurring the lines between science and faith to make their case that certain forms of biological life are too complex to have evolved through Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. “If the model proposed by Darwin is held to be inadequate, one should look for another model. But it is not correct methodology to stray from the field of science pretending to do science,” he wrote.
Elizabeth Bryant in Berlin reports that Germany is boasting the world’s fastest-growing Jewish population: By almost any benchmark, Boris Rosenthal is a German success story. Fifteen years after arriving here with his family and a few suitcases, the native Ukrainian juggles a teaching job with a blossoming musical career, and speaks proudly in his adopted language of having a “German” mentality. But Rosenthal’s is no ordinary immigrant’s rags-to-riches tale. Sixty years after the fall of Nazi Germany, he is among an estimated 200,000 Jews from former Communist states who have flocked here in recent years, reviving a once-minute postwar community. Since 1990, the number of registered Jews has soared to nearly 106,000 from 30,000. Indeed, Germany boasts the world’s fastest-growing Jewish population, thanks to a generous immigration policy drafted partly to atone for the Holocaust.
Stephen Whitty reviews Albert Brooks’ supposedly edgy film on Islamic humor: Albert Brooks goes on a State Department mission to explore Islamic humor in “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World,” a supposedly brave, secretly scared comedy about culture clashes. Unfortunately, the film is set safely in India, and few of the jokes confront religion, politics or any other controversial issues. Like a poorly updated Cold War comedy, the film seems to weakly suggest that if we could simply share a few laughs we’d all get along. If only it provided more of them. The film opens Friday (Jan. 20) in New York.
