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Several prominent scientists, philosophers, and scientific institutions have argued that science cannot test supernatural worldviews on the grounds that (1) science presupposes a naturalistic worldview (Naturalism) or that (2) claims involving supernatural phenomena are inherently beyond the scope of scientific investigation. The present paper argues that these assumptions are questionable and that indeed science can test supernatural claims. While scientific evidence may ultimately support a naturalistic worldview, science does not presuppose Naturalism as an a priori commitment, and supernatural claims are amenable to scientific evaluation. This conclusion challenges the rationale behind a recent judicial ruling in the United States concerning the teaching of "Intelligent Design" in public schools as an alternative to evolution and the official statements of two major scientific institutions that exert a substantial influence on science educational policies in the United States. Given that science does have implications concerning the probable truth of supernatural worldviews, claims should not be excluded a priori from science education simply because they might be characterized as supernatural, paranormal, or religious. Rather, claims should be excluded from science education when the evidence does not support them, regardless of whether they are designated as "natural" or "supernatural".

This paper explores how students, as multimodal storytellers, can weave powerful narratives blending modes, genres, artefacts and literary conventions to represent the real and imagined in their lives. Part of a larger ethnographic case study of student writing in a middle years class for immigrant students learning English as an additional language, the research featured in this paper is framed by a theory of artefactual literacies, narrative theory--particularly the genre of magical realism--and cultural studies, specifically notions of representation and cultural identity. The theoretical emphases on the artefactual, structural and representational aspects of multimodal narratives informs a multilayered, fine-grained approach to analysing students' digital narrative poems using the tools of critical discourse analysis, literary analysis and a visual analytic framework developed for analysing student-produced digital photographs. This process is applied to a selected example, Gabriel's "My Name Is" narrative, a story that plays with elements of magical real-ism to explore the simultaneity of his experience as an immigrant youth. The illustrative example speaks to the power of the "fantastical" in literacy pedagogies that seek to take seriously students' cultural identities and their visions for new realities. (Contains 2 tables and 2 figures.)

To speak about separatism as a Canadian is to use a loaded term, one that invokes a significant yet historically specific sociocultural moment. Winners and losers emerged, and in the process, the word "separatism" received a bad rap. Consequently, as a white Canadian who still believes in at least the optimism of the multiculturalist project, the author is forced by Craig Womack's "Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism" to face head-on his intuitions about separatism that have been more than a little colored by his Jewish-English-Quebecker roots. To speak of "literary separatism" is to first admit the failures of the media-dominated discourses on nationality and unity, and secondly to attempt to understand what sovereignty might really imply when it is transposed into the realm of the imagination. This is not to say that Womack's literary history is not political--it is certainly one of the most world-making and affirming criticisms that exists today; rather, Womack is able to build a Creek community that defines and evaluates itself internally by reimagining its own borders. The author writes this paper as a dialogue and as a further invitation to dialogue, for Womack's version of sovereignty reworks the lines of communication in positive and liberating ways. The author talks about the works of Craig Womack, his version of imaginative sovereignty and the relevance of literary history. (Contains 1 note.)

The Bush Administration's quiet resumption of, or initiation of new, nuclear weapons programs aimed militarizing space, and erecting a missile defense shield that would have the effect of rolling back 19 years of solid detente, has gone largely unnoticed over the last eight years. Weapons makers, government officials and politicians have expressed excitement at these new developments, despite the immediate stress loaded onto relations between the United States and Europe, particularly ex-Soviet satellite countries. This paper revisits arguments about nuclear weaponry and the possibility for defense against and survival of a nuclear war. The paper considers the way new nuclear technologies are inherently determinist, and reflects on the threat of the apocalyptic world as seen in American author Cormac McCarthy's unflinching 2006 novel, The Road. (Contains 7 notes.)

The author found "This Bridge Called My Back" at the local public library when she was, at age thirty-three, finally beginning to write again, and write honestly. There were Indian voices in "Bridge"--a few poems or personal narratives that moved her, but which barely began to represent the range of the writers or the astonishingly diverse Native communities from which these writers emerged. The author wanted to belong to this book, she wanted to own this book, she wanted her struggles as an "Indian woman" to be present and "part" of this beautiful, incredible book! In many ways, the book was somebody else's story. She felt that in order to have some claim to the book's power, she needed to become a sort of "generic" woman of color, lose her Indianness. The underrepresentation of Native women in "Bridge" is by no means an anomaly. The author has not found Indian women's voices to be truly present in most publications or forums, academic coursework, readings, conferences, or critical analyses of American literatures and culture (including projects by and about women of color). American Indian experiences are still absent from a communal discourse about racism, representation, academic life, literary theory, or the powers of love. The call for papers for this look back at "Bridge" has brought all these frustrations, never far away from the author, back full force. Women of color still need to talk about what it's like to be an Indigenous person alive in her still-colonized homeland; someone who, when she looks at that homeland, sees few traces of an Indigenous presence, or none that are recognizable--and yet, "knows that Indigenous presence is there because she is it." What does this do to their hearts, their sanity? What does it do to the other cultures and communities living in this homeland? The author has struggled to find the words for telling this, but perhaps the best way is through her own story as an Indian woman in academia in the late twentieth century. Four years into the academy, the author is only beginning to bridge the gaps found there--and to do it without using her own back as the bridge, refusing to learn "conditioned subservience," or bear the burdens of dehumanizing absent histories and voices. Some of her Indian friends have fled or abandoned academia, disgusted or exhausted by the constant battle; some have graduated with degrees only to find that non-Native scholars fill many of the positions in Native studies; others have simply turned their tremendous gifts and energies in other directions, discounting the university as a place with the potential to make a difference. So far, the author has stayed--isolated as a student, as a part-time lecturer, as a writer. She no longer fear that she will be judged "unable" to separate her mind from heart; instead, she acknowledges that she is "unwilling" to separate intellectual work from the work of the heart. (Contains 11 notes.)

This article presents an interview with the noted Nepali American fiction writer Samrat Upadhyay. Samrat Upadhyay's fiction is mostly about his native country of Nepal, but he writes mainly for an Anglo-American audience. In the interview, Upadhyay not only discusses his own work, but he also examines samples of prose by other Asian or Asian American authors. He chose the excerpts himself that have been part of workshops he has given on the study and practice of cross-cultural writing. The authors specifically analyze with him issues of translation that he has faced in his own work and that he has found in the prose of other Asian and Asian American authors who, like him, primarily address an Anglo-American audience.

W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963) is widely known as a champion for the political rights of African Americans, founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), aggressive advocate of Pan-Africanism, staunch supporter of female suffrage, and one of the creative forces behind the Harlem Renaissance. Further still, Du Bois is known for his storied debates with Booker T. Washington and his magisterial "Souls of Black Folk" (1903). Those who study Du Bois and religion uniformly show how religion constituted a major part of his social scientific analysis of the world. Others document how a latent spirituality informed Du Bois's outlook on politics, economics, and society. Most of this work analyzes Du Bois's major studies and only minimally makes use of Du Bois's creative writing, with even less attention on what he wrote for "The Crisis," the NAACP's magazine that he edited from 1910 to 1934. This essay complements the existing scholarship on Du Bois and religion by attempting to more fully utilize what the author calls his "Crisis corpus." More specifically, by utilizing the latest scholarly perspectives, the author offers pedagogical strategies by sharing document-based lessons on Du Bois and religion from his own experience teaching in a secondary setting and university classroom. He discusses how he incorporates columns from the NAACP's "The Crisis" magazine into lessons on early twentieth-century America. Reading the contents of "The Crisis"--in particular the appearance of religion on its pages--can provide a more nuanced understanding of the rapid changes that defined the first few decades of twentieth-century American history. (Contains 31 notes.)

This essay explores a reading of "Robinson Crusoe" that suggests the novel has taken on new gravity after the first "preemptive" war in U.S. history, a war justified by the attempt to "spread freedom" to Iraq. It examines how Crusoe comes to understand the relationship between the state and the individual. Robinson Crusoe demonstrates that John Locke's principle of tolerance actually entails exclusions, for Crusoe ultimately destroys the cannibals to protect his supposedly liberal order. This paradox has implications for the current war in Iraq, where the United States government invokes the ideal of freedom while insisting on its own particular vision of democracy. Crusoe teaches us that freedom imposed is limited and potentially involves the sacrifice of something fundamental to the subject's identity. (Contains 16 notes.)

J. K. Rowling's series about the young, orphaned Harry Potter who escapes his often hostile, nonmagical Muggle (or human) existence for a world of ghosts, spells, and potions, magical objects, and exotic creatures to be found at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry has captivated a worldwide audience. Since the publication in England of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" in June 1997 (titled "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" in the United States), the series has become an unprecedented phenomenon in the book publishing industry. In addition to being a publishing phenomenon, the Harry Potter books have, however, become a touchstone for controversy; not all Muggles approve of Harry. There has been a range of responses to the series in literary, religious, and legal arenas. The authors discuss the literary criticism of Rowling's "Harry Potter" series and the challenges to the series's inclusion in school curricula or library collections. The authors also discuss the legal challenges to reading instruction that involves fantasy such as that contained in the "Harry Potter" series. They cite a case of challenges to "Harry Potter" and the court's conclusion in the case, which makes it clear that objections to the placement of books in the school library considered by school officials to have the potential to subvert authority or that consider ideas (e.g., witchcraft or the occult) that some authorities find distasteful are insufficient to deny children's access to such materials. (Contains 6 notes.)

The author of this article provides a critical assessment of Simon J. Ortiz's collection of poetry, "Out There Somewhere," to see how this literature of resistance continues through cultural connections. The resistance one finds in the poems--against mainstream political, social, and economic forces--results in continuance of Ortiz's Acoma heritage. That natives can "still" be natives when they are away from their tribal homelands speaks to those who are urban natives, which is over two-thirds of the native population in the United States: those natives who have left the reservation for economic reasons; those native tribes who have no land base; those natives who have no federal recognition as official native tribes; and those natives who for reasons of patrilineal or matrilineal descent have no tribal affiliation. Although they are "out there somewhere," they continue to be native, as Ortiz so deftly demonstrates.

This essay examines Jefferson's Summary View of the Rights of British America as evidence of his craft as a storyteller. Specifically, I argue that Jefferson deploys a series of narrative renderings, the rhetorical effect of which is to eliminate the possibility of any genuine reconciliation with the English government. On the basis of this interpretation I conclude that the Summary View represents Jefferson's first declaration of independence. (Contains 33 notes.)

Should teachers sacrifice class time for professional development? Two authors present their arguments to this question. The first author contends that teachers should definitely use class time for professional development. Technology is changing and growing all the time, and it is their job to prepare students for the world they will inherit. Professional development should be about supporting the learning process, and technology is a proven way of doing this. Therefore, all time spent doing this should be considered valuable. On the other hand, the second author contends that teachers should not sacrifice class time for professional development because the country is in the midst of an economic and budget disaster that has left schools with a shortage of money to pay even for basic supplies or the salaries of the teachers who still have their jobs. Schools should be in crisis mode, and there should be a total suspension of staff development programs for the duration of this downturn. In addition, teachers have 35-45 students in their rooms and need all the time they can get to teach.