Steven Waldman

For months now, pro-choice activists have resisted those pro-life Democrats who said they wanted to "reduce the number" of abortions. No, no, they said, the goal should be "reducing the need" for abortion, a goal that's less stigmatizing to women who have abortions.

Did President Obama tell Pope Benedict point blank that he wants to reduce the number?

So says the Pope's spokesman, Federico Lombard, who explained, "The pontiff told me that President Obama affirmed his personal commitment to try to reduce the number of abortions in the United States."

Of course it's also possible that the painstaking nuanced differences between "reducing the need" and "reducing the number" got lost in the translation.

Beliefnet Blogger Francis Collins was nominated to be head of the National Institutes of Health!

Okay, being a Beliefnet blogger is not Francis Collin's main claim to fame, though the blog that he and his BioLogos foundation run -- Science and the Sacred -- is fascinating, stimulating and often inspiring.

He's probably more appropriately known as the former head of the Human Genome Project and as the author of the book God's Language.

I have no idea whether Collins will administer the National Institutes of Health well, but President Obama's appointment of Collins is significant as a culture war statement. A devout Christian, Collins is one of the foremost advocates for the notion that science and faith are compatible. He's a strong believer but he doesn't let that weaken his scientific rigor (for instance, he's been critical of Creationism and Intelligent Design).

In Science and the Sacred, Collins wrote:

"Suppose God chose to use the mechanism of evolution to create animals like us, knowing this process would lead to big-brained creatures with the capacity to think, ask questions about our own origins, discover the truth about the universe and discover pointers toward the One who provides meaning to life. Who are we to say that's not how we would have done it? If you believe that God is the creator, how could the truths about nature we discover through science be a threat to God? For many scientists who believe in God -- including me -- it's just the opposite. Everything we learn about the natural world only increases our awe of the God the creator....

I urge us all to step back from the conflict and look soberly at the truth of both of God's books: the book of God's words and the book of God's works. As people dedicated to truth, let us resolve to move beyond a theology of defensiveness to a theology that celebrates God's goodness and creative power."

Collins was mocked by Bill Maher in his movie Religulous, so perhaps Collins appointment will generate suspicion among secularists. And because he's advocated "theistic evolution" -- the idea that God set in motion the laws of the universe, including natural selection -- there are some more fundamentalist Christians who may sniff at Collins.

But to me, Collins is not just a scientific leader, he's a Christian role model -- showing that being a believer doesn't mean checking your brain at the church door, that people of faith have just as much intellectual heft as seculars, and, most important,.how faith and science can happily co-exist.

A version of this was printed on The Wall Street Journal Online

Referring to her political future, Sarah Palin said, "If I die, I die."

When I first heard this I assumed this language was designed to feed the Christian sense of persecution. Turns out it's even more Biblically resonant than that.

Esther 4:15: "When this is done, I will go to the king, even though it is against the law. And if I perish, I perish."

New Wineskins speculates on Palin's relationship with Esther, though Beliefnet's David Gibson was way ahead of the pack on Esther-mania.

Perhaps by the time Michael Jackson was an adult, he was drawn toward the outrageous, unusual or abnormal, but as a child he seemed to want nothing more than to be like other kids.

"More than anything, I wished to be a normal little boy," he wrote in an extraordinary essay on Beliefnet in 2000. "I wanted to build tree houses and go to roller-skating parties. But very early on, this became impossible. I had to accept that my childhood would be different than most others. But that's what always made me wonder what an ordinary childhood would be like."

It's easy to see how his yearning for a lost childhood connects to his fixation with Peter Pan and is abnormal relationships with children.

But Jackson said his religion provided some of his few moments of normality. Raised as a Jehovah's Witness, Jackson as a child would go door to door peddling religious literature. As an adult, he would put on a fat suit and disguise to hand out material at the shopping mall, and gain peace from his anonymity, and his own celebration of Sabbath:

"Sundays were my day for "Pioneering," the term used for the missionary work that Jehovah's Witnesses do. We would spend the day in the suburbs of Southern California, going door to door or making the rounds of a shopping mall, distributing our Watchtower magazine. I continued my pioneering work for years and years after my career had been launched. Up to 1991, the time of my Dangerous tour, I would don my disguise of fat suit, wig, beard, and glasses and head off to live in the land of everyday America, visiting shopping plazas and tract homes in the suburbs."

He attended Church each Sunday and mourned the loss of his ability to do that:

"When circumstances made it increasingly complex for me to attend, I was comforted by the belief that God exists in my heart, and in music and in beauty, not only in a building. But I still miss the sense of community that I felt there--I miss the friends and the people who treated me like I was simply one of them. Simply human. Sharing a day with God."

Clearly Jackson wasn't really normal. On some level he must surely have thirst for the abnormal. After all, his fame flowed not just from his talent but his strangeness. Yet part of the tragedy was his longing for his lost childhood.

It's worth reading Jackson's entire essay.

As a parent of two teenage boys, we're in a constant struggle to figure out what movies or TV shows are appropriate. (The latest debate: Bruno). It's a struggle, and the source of much friction, but we figure it's our parental responsibility to try to regulate sexual content.

Then I saw this Burger King campaign and thought.... what's the point? Why do we bother? We can block HBO but Burger King is right there in our face with an image of an attractive, shocked looking woman, with bright red lipstick, opening up her mouth to take in the "super seven incher."

UPDATE 7/8, 9:56: Burger King says the ad is running only in Singapore.

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