This 47-million-year-old fossil of an ancient 'small cat'-sized primate is believed to be an ancestor of monkeys, humans and other primates.

Michael Shermer
Special to CNN

Tuesday marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" on November 24, 1859. All 1,250 copies of the initial print run of the book were scooped up by readers eager to see the British naturalist going rogue with his radical new theory of evolution, "By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life," in the book's full title.

How important is this book? Thomas Henry Huxley ("Darwin's bulldog") proclaimed that "On the Origin of Species" was "the most potent instrument for the extension of the realm of knowledge which has come into man's hands since Newton's 'Principia,' " and lamented to himself: "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that."

The Harvard biologist Ernst Mayr, arguably the greatest evolutionary theorist since Darwin, asserted: "It would be difficult to refute the claim that the Darwinian revolution was the greatest of all intellectual revolutions in the history of mankind." The Harvard paleontologist and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould called the theory of evolution one of the half dozen most important ideas in the entire history of Western thought.

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CNN

On November 24, 1859, the first edition of a book that would shake the most deeply established beliefs about life was published in London. What would eventually be known as "The Origin of Species" was the opening shot in a debate that hasn't ended, even 150 years later.

In a series of books starting in 1976 and in his 2002 TED Talk, biologist Richard Dawkins has explored the implications of Darwin's work. In "The Selfish Gene," Dawkins wrote, "Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over 300,000 million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin."

Dawkins argues that there is no doubt that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is true and, unlike some other scholars of the subject, says belief in evolution is not compatible with faith in religion. In fact, he argues, science and religion undermine each other.

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Gary Tuchman | BIO
AC360° Anchor

Arsalan Iftikhar
AC360° Contributor
Founder, TheMuslimGuy.com

Most of the world's 1.57 billion Muslims know that the Holy Quran states quite clearly that, "Anyone who kills a human being ... it shall be as though he has killed all of mankind. ... If anyone saves a life, it shall be as though he has saved the lives of all of mankind."

Accordingly, it should come as little surprise to any reasonable observer that when Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan recently committed his shocking acts of mass murder at Fort Hood, Texas, America's Muslim community of over 7 million felt an added sense of horror and sadness at this senseless attack against the brave men and women of the U.S. armed forces.

True to form, many conservative media pundits wasted little time in pointing to reports that Hasan had said "Allahu Akbar" (Arabic for "God is great") at the start of his murderous rampage. News coverage continuously showed the looping convenience store black-and-white videotape footage of Hasan wearing traditional white Islamic garb.

First of all, someone simply saying "Allahu Akbar" while committing an act of mass murder no more makes their criminal act "Islamic" than a Christian uttering the "Hail Mary" while murdering an abortion medical provider, or someone chanting "Onward, Christian Soldiers" while bombing a gay nightclub, would make their act "Christian" in nature.

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Program Note: See an investigation into why authorities are concerned about the violent messages being preached outside a New York mosque on tonight's AC360° at 10 PM ET.

Drew Griffin and Kathleen Johnston
CNN

Outside a Manhattan mosque where the imam preaches against terrorism, the brothers of the "Revolution Muslim" are spreading a different message.

Protected by the Constitution of the country they detest, radical Muslim converts like Yousef al-Khattab and Younes Abdullah Mohammed preach that the killing of U.S. troops overseas is justified. In their thinking, so were the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States - and so are attacks on almost any American.

"Americans will always be a target - and a legitimate target - until America changes its nature in the international arena," Mohammed said.

Al-Khattab and Mohammed consider al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden their model.

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Program Note: See an investigation into why authorities are concerned about the violent messages being preached outside a New York mosque on tonight's AC 360 at 10 PM ET.

Drew Griffin and Kathleen Johnston
CNN

Outside a Manhattan mosque where the imam preaches against terrorism, the brothers of the "Revolution Muslim" are spreading a different message.

Protected by the Constitution of the country they detest, radical Muslim converts like Yousef al-Khattab and Younes Abdullah Mohammed preach that the killing of U.S. troops overseas is justified. In their thinking, so were the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States - and so are attacks on almost any American.

"Americans will always be a target - and a legitimate target - until America changes its nature in the international arena," Mohammed said.

Al-Khattab and Mohammed consider al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden their model.

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St. Cecilia's nearly closed. After it was designated the parish home for Latinos, the congregation quadrupled.

Emily Probst
CNN

"I'll take two chili, uh..." a hungry customer stammers at the front of a two-hour-long line. "Chile rellenos," the money-handler trills back in perfect Spanish. This is not a trendy Tex-Mex restaurant; and it's more than 1,000 miles from the Mexican border.

The stuffed pepper causing the stutter is the hottest menu item at St. Cecilia's Lenten fish fry in St. Louis, Missouri. Chile rellenos, a traditional Mexican dish, have replaced fish as the main draw for Catholics giving up meat on Fridays. This century-old parish founded by German immigrants has turned 85 percent Hispanic.

"It's the browning of the Catholic Church in the United States," says Pedro Moreno Garcia, who until last month led the Hispanic ministry for the Archdiocese of St. Louis. Moreno Garcia points to St. Cecilia's Spanish-dominant Mass schedule as a sign of the times.

"Hispanics are the present and Hispanics are the future of the Catholic Church in the United States," says Moreno Garcia.

One-third of all Catholics in the United States are now Latinos thanks to immigration and higher fertility rates, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. While St. Cecilia's parish has relished the growth, elsewhere, the Latino population boom has rocked the pews.

"Instead of screaming out, 'The British are coming!' " Moreno Garcia says some people are screaming, " 'The Hispanics are coming! The Hispanics are coming! Run, run.' "

A self-described Nuyorican or Puerto Rican from New York, Moreno Garcia says even he gets mislabeled.

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Alyssa Fetini
TIME

The split between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims is one of the most important schisms in modern religion — yet in the West, at least, it's one of the least understood. The centuries-old strife sporadically erupts into new bloodshed throughout the Middle East — today, particularly, in war-torn Iraq, where the power vacuum left by the fall of Saddam Hussein has reopened old wounds. As British-born journalist Lesley Hazleton argues, these wounds have been left to fester by a lack of adequate planning or understanding of the issue's complexities on the part of American policymakers. Her new book, After the Prophet, recounts the epic story of the split between Islam's two main factions and its present role in the Middle East. TIME talked to Hazleton about the history and misunderstandings of this dispute and what, if anything, can be done to extinguish it once and for all.

What's the Shi'ite-Sunni split really about?
It's about who should lead Islam, and it began at the moment of Muhammad's death. As the founder of Islam, he was the undisputed leader. And if he had had a son, the split might never have happened — a son would automatically have inherited his father's authority. But he died without sons and without leaving a clear will. His closest male relative was his cousin and son-in-law, the philosopher-warrior Ali, whose followers — the Shiat Ali [followers of Ali], or Shi'ite for short — say that he was the only one with the spiritual authority to succeed Muhammad. The Sunnis believed that the caliphate should go to whoever would be best equipped politically to maintain the burgeoning Muslim empire, backing Muhammad's father-in-law Abu Bakr. In the end, Abu Bakr was named the first caliph. Though Ali eventually assumed the caliphate 25 years later, he was assassinated, power fell to the founder of the first Sunni dynasty, and the Shi'ites felt a terrible, lasting sense of dispossession. In a nutshell, the difference between the two is that the Sunnis tend to respect how power actually works rather than the way it should work in an ideal world. In a sense, the Shi'ite ideology is more idealistic, while the Sunni one more pragmatic.

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President Obama, speaking in Cairo, Egypt, urges a new chapter in ties between the U.S. and the Muslim world.

Eboo Patel
For On Faith
washingtonpost.com

Whoever selects and assigns the books on Islam for the Sunday New York Times Book Review needs to widen his reading and add some new names to his rolodex.

Last week there was a rave review of Bruce Bawer's alarmist book Surrender (the subtitle says it all: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom).

This week, the cover of the Book Review has a picture of a group of fully covered Muslim women set against a crowd of 'normal-looking' mostly-white Europeans with the headline "Strangers in the Land".

The review betrays more about the opinions of the reviewer – the noted and controversial academic Fouad Ajami – than the book under consideration, Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.

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Editor's note: This is a video of a church in Baghdad. It was the worst hit on Sunday evening.

Editor's Note: This is an excerpt from Jon Krakauer's book "Under the Banner of Heaven" about the Mormon faith. Krakauer is also known for his other books "Into the Wild", "Into Thin Air" and "Eiger Dreams". He won the Academy Award in Literature in 1999. Two Americans recently killed in Mexico, Benjamin LeBaron and Luis Widmar, lived in a Mexican township founded by ex-communicated Mormons.

Jon Krakauer

From "Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith"

Balanced atop the highest spire of the Salt Lake Temple, gleaming in the Utah sun, a statue of the angel Moroni stands watch over downtown Salt Lake City with his golden trumpet raised This massive granite edifice is the spiritual and temporal nexus of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), which presents itself as the world's only true religion. Temple Square is to Mormons what the Vatican is to Catholics, or the Kaaba in Mecca is to Muslims. At last count there were more than eleven million Saints the world over, and Mormonism is the fastest-growing faith in the Western Hemisphere. At present in the United States there are more Mormons than Presbyterians or Episcopalians. On the planet as a whole, there are now more Mormons than Jews. Mormonism is considered in some sober academic circles to be well on its way to becoming a major world religion–the first such faith to emerge since Islam…

The affairs of Mormondom are directed by a cadre of elderly white males in dark suits who carry out their holy duties from a twenty-six-story office tower beside Temple Square. To a man, the LDS leadership adamantly insists that Lafferty should under no circumstances be considered a Mormon. The faith that moved Lafferty to slay his niece and sister-in-law is a brand of religion known as Mormon Fundamentalism; LDS Church authorities bristle visibly when Mormons and Mormon Fundamentalists are even mentioned in the same breath. As Gordon B. Hinckley, the then-eighty-eight-year-old LDS president and prophet, emphasized during a 1998 television interview on Larry King Live, "They have no connection with us whatever. They don't belong to the church. There are actually no Mormon Fundamentalists."…

There are more than thirty thousand FLDS polygamists living in Canada, Mexico, and throughout the American West. Some experts estimate there may be as many as one hundred thousand. Even this larger number amounts to less than 1 percent of the membership in the LDS Church worldwide, but all the same, leaders of the mainstream church are extremely discomfited by these legions of polygamous brethren. Mormon authorities treat the fundamentalists as they would a crazy uncle–they try to keep the "polygs" hidden in the attic, safely out of sight, but the fundamentalists always seem to be sneaking out to appear in public at inopportune moments to create unsavory scenes, embarrassing the entire LDS clan.
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David Puente
AC360° Producer

Father Alberto Cutie, who millions of Hispanics know simply as El Padre Alberto, has married the woman that he called “the love of his life”. The charismatic Miami priest left the Catholic Church after photos of him kissing his girlfriend – now his wife – on the beach were published in a magazine.

Father Alberto left the Catholic Church last month to become an Episcopal priest. Now many believe the Episcopal Church will become better known and more popular especially with Hispanics who know Father Alberto from his radio and TV broadcasts across the US and Latin America. He's been dubbed "Father Oprah."

Obama spoke about Jesus throughout his speech at Notre Dame.

Eamon Javers
Politico

He’s done it while talking about abortion and the Middle East, even the economy. The references serve at once as an affirmation of his faith and a rebuke against a rumor that persists for some to this day.

As president, Barack Obama has mentioned Jesus Christ in a number of high-profile public speeches — something his predecessor George W. Bush rarely did in such settings, even though Bush’s Christian faith was at the core of his political identity.

In his speech Thursday in Cairo, Obama told the crowd that he is a Christian and mentioned the Islamic story of Isra, in which Moses, Jesus and Mohammed joined in prayer.

At the University of Notre Dame on May 17, Obama talked about the good works he’d seen done by Christian community groups in Chicago. “I found myself drawn — not just to work with the church but to be in the church,” Obama said. “It was through this service that I was brought to Christ.”

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Program Note: Tune in to AC360° tonight at 10 p.m. ET for more on the Alberto Cutie scandal.

CNN

An internationally known Catholic priest who was shown in photographs last week embracing a bathing-suit-clad woman on a Florida beach has admitted they had a two-year affair.

The Rev. Alberto Cutie - sometimes called "Father Oprah" because of the advice he gave on Spanish-language media - said Monday on CBS' "Early Show" that he is in love with the woman and is considering his options: Whether to break up with her or leave the priesthood and marry her. The woman, who has not been publicly identified, wants to get married, Cutie said.

The priest was removed from his duties last week at St. Francis De Sales Catholic Church in Miami Beach, Florida, and on the Radio Paz and Radio Peace networks.

"I take full responsibility for what I did, and I know it's wrong," he said Monday.

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Bill Schneider
CNN Political Correspondent

If Sonia Sotomayor is confirmed there will be six Catholics on the Supreme Court (Roberts, Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Sotomayor). Two Jews (Ginsburg and Breyer). And one Protestant. (Stevens).

Here's the breakdown in the overall U.S. population:

Protestant 51.3%, Roman Catholic 23.9%, Mormon 1.7%, other Christian 1.6%, Jewish 1.7%, Buddhist 0.7%, Muslim 0.6%, other or unspecified 2.5%, unaffiliated 12.1%, none 4% (2007 est.)

Religion –- at least, religious affiliation - was once a hot issue in Supreme Court nominations. But no longer.
When John Kerry, also Catholic, ran for President in 2004, no one seemed to care except the Catholic Church – and they opposed him because he did not follow church teachings on abortion.

Gender and race? Those do matter. If Republicans appear to be treating Sotomayor unfairly, they could pay a terrible price at the polls.

People pray at the University of Notre Dame to protest Obama's commencement address.

Eboo Patel
Interfaith Youth Core
AC360° Contributor

One concrete result of the controversy at Notre Dame this weekend was a much larger audience for President Obama's Commencement Address. What we witnessed was a near perfect demonstration of public leadership in an environment of polarization. Obama is at his best when others are squabbling and he plays the role of saying, "We can do better than this."

I confess to a special interest. I owe my American citizenship to Notre Dame. The University accepted my father's application to its MBA program thirty years ago (at the time, he was one of only a handful of international students on campus, and doubly in the minority as a Muslim). He loves the University with all his heart – it was his gateway to America. I grew up watching Notre Dame football players touch the yellow "Play Like a Champion Today" sign as they ran out of the locker room onto the field. The President must have touched that sign before his speech, because it was worthy of all those great Notre Dame legends, from Knute Rockne to Joe Montana to Touchdown Jesus.

Harvard scholar Howard Gardener says that the most important thing that leaders do is tell a new story about the possibility of the world, and then embody it themselves. Obama accomplished that masterfully in three basic steps in his speech.

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Thomas J. Reese, S.J.
Senior Fellow, Woodstock Theological Center, Georgetown University
For The Washington Post

THIS CATHOLIC'S VIEW

President Obama's reception at Notre Dame showed once again that a new generation of Americans, including Catholics, is looking for a different kind of leader, not one who speaks down to his audience, demands strict loyalty and demonizes opponents, but one who addresses complexity with honesty, acknowledges disagreements and tries to bring people together for the common good.

President Obama showed himself to be respectful of Catholic views, of Catholic institutions like Notre Dame and of Catholic leaders like Notre Dame's former president, Father Ted Hesburgh, and Chicago's former archbishop, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin.

In his speech, he praised Notre Dame for being, in the words of Father Hesburgh, both a lighthouse and a crossroads. "The lighthouse that stands apart, shining with the wisdom of the Catholic tradition, while the crossroads is where 'differences of culture and religion and conviction can coexist with friendship, civility, hospitality and especially love.'"

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Pope Benedict leaves the Church of Nativity in his pope mobile after celebrating Mass Wednesday in Bethlehem.

John L. Allen Jr.
CNN Senior Vatican Analyst

For some time now, people have asked why someone doesn’t give the Vatican some PR help. This afternoon, someone finally did – and it was a Jew to boot.

The setting was an inter-faith meeting in Nazareth, the traditional hometown of Jesus and his parents, Joseph and Mary, in the Galilee region of northern Israel. The event brought Pope Benedict XVI together with local leaders of the Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Druze faiths.

As it turned out, the event produced arguably the best visual of the pope’s week-long trip to the Middle East. At the end of the brief session, Alon Goshen-Gottstein, a Jew who runs an inter-faith center in Jerusalem, led the assembly in a rousing song he had composed specially for the occasion. It was titled “Salaam, Shalom, Lord Grant Us Peace.”

As the song went on, the religious leaders on stage began to join in, including the pontiff himself. At the end, the rabbis, sheikhs, bishops, and other spiritual leaders rose from their seats and held hands, as the word for peace in various languages was belted out in the hall. Benedict was standing in the center of the group, singing and holding hands with a rabbi and a Druze sheikh.

For a pope who sometimes struggles to think in pictures, it was almost a “John Paul moment,” meaning a symbolic gesture reminiscent of his charismatic predecessor, Pope John Paul II.

Benedict has said repeatedly that he came to the Middle East to promote peace, especially peace among the religions, and this was perhaps the most visibly effective way of communicating that idea in a flash all week.

As it turns out, the pope got a PR assist from Goshen-Gottstein.

After the event broke up, a visibly emotional Goshen-Gottstein said that he had composed the song only in the last 72 hours, after the pope took part in another inter-faith meeting in Jerusalem Monday night. On that occasion, an anti-Israeli rant from a Muslim cleric roiled the waters and cast a pall over the event.

“I was tormented and anguished that this opportunity was being wasted,” he said, referring to the papal trip.

So, he set to work. Using Jewish friends active in planning today’s event, Goshen-Gottstein passed along a proposal to the Vatican: Why not have a sing-along for peace today in Nazareth, which would include the iconic moment of hand-holding.

“I told them, you need a visual,” Goshen Gottstein said. “There should be a picture to correct what went wrong.”

“I wanted something that would show religious leaders united, that would be hopeful,” he said.

Goshen-Gottstein added one other detail. Just one hour before the event was to begin, there was no power for his electric piano. Given the way the various pieces fell into place – a normally slow-moving Vatican agreeing to a change in program just 48 hours in advance, electricity being miraculously restored – he couldn’t help but feel a bit of divine intervention was involved.

“Let the world remember this moment,” Goshen-Gottstein said.

Benedict winds up his week-long swing through the Middle East tomorrow, and this afternoon seemed to get the pope back on track after what had been a mixed reception in Israel. All it took was some PR savvy from an unlikely source.

Program Note: Tune in tonight for more on the controversy surrounding Pres. Obama's speech at Notre Dame this weekend on AC360° at 10 p.m. ET.

CNN

The Catholic bishop of South Bend, Indiana, will not attend graduation ceremonies at the University of Notre Dame because he disagrees with the stem-cell research and abortion views of the commencement speaker - President Obama.

Bishop John D'Arcy, whose diocese includes Fort Wayne, Indiana, as well as the university town, said Tuesday in a written statement that "after much prayer" he has decided not to attend the ceremony.

"President Obama has recently reaffirmed, and has now placed in public policy, his long-stated unwillingness to hold human life as sacred," D'Arcy said. "While claiming to separate politics from science, he has in fact separated science from ethics and has brought the American government, for the first time in history, into supporting direct destruction of innocent human life."

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Jordan's King Abdullah II speaks with Pope Benedict XVI at the international airport in Amman on Friday.

John L. Allen Jr.
CNN Senior Vatican Analyst
Amman, Jordan

For reporters covering the foreign travels of Pope Benedict XVI, head of the Roman Catholic Church and arguably the most important religious leader in the world, the hardest part of trying to handicap these events is knowing which pontiff will show up.

Will it be the Benedict of Regensburg, Germany, in 2006, who delivered a speech linking Muhammad to violence that set off a firestorm of protest all across the Islamic world? Or will it be the Benedict of highly successful expeditions to Turkey in 2006 and the United States in 2008, where the pontiff turned in bravura performances that went a long way toward healing wounds and improving his public image?

After four years as pope, Benedict XVI has shown a host of impressive qualities: theological brilliance, personal humility, and a teacher’s aptitude for clarity. His track record at public relations, however, is spottier, making any turn on the public stage something of a roll of the dice.

After day one of Benedict’s keenly anticipated May 8-15 visit to Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, it’s too early to know quite how things are going to break here, but one thing seems abundantly clear: The pope and his Vatican advisors are determined to stay “on message,” stressing reconciliation, tolerance, and peace at every turn.

His customary session with the press aboard the papal plane this morning makes the point.

Popes don’t hold press conferences very often, and in the past these occasions have sometimes proved perilous for Benedict XVI. En route to Brazil in 2007, Benedict took a question about excommunicating pro-choice politicians that swamped much of the rest of his trip. More recently, Benedict made comments about condoms and AIDS on his way to Africa that generated a broad controversy, once again eclipsing the rest of his message.

This time, Benedict came back to the press compartment on the plane about an hour after takeoff, and even by the normally controlled standards of the Vatican, the effort at image management was striking.

For one thing, the pope’s spokespersons had requested that journalists submit their queries several days in advance, which obviously afforded the Vatican time to screen them and the pope time to prepare his replies. To avoid any surprises, journalists weren’t even called upon to ask the prepared questions; instead, Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesperson, read them to the pope, saying he was doing so “in the name” of the press.

The predictable result was that Benedict didn’t make headlines, but he also didn’t put a foot wrong. Speaking in a largely conciliatory tone, he said he hoped to advance the cause of peace, not as a politician but as a man of prayer and a voice of conscience. He affirmed his desire for stronger ties among Jews, Muslims and Christians, saying that “we have to learn to speak one another’s language.”

The closest Benedict came to veering off-script came when, in the context of Jewish/Christian relations, he added a typical bit of professorial flourish. Arguing that occasional misunderstandings are probably inevitable after 2,000 years of moving down separate historical paths, Benedict said each faith lives in its own “semantic cosmos.”

Quickly, however, the pope got back his stride, saying it’s time for those different “semantic cosmoses” to meet.

Overall, Benedict’s aim on this week-long journey is to advance dialogue with both Judaism and Islam, try to provide a ray of hope in the Israeli/Palestinian peace process by supporting both a Palestinian state and Israeli security, and give a shot in the arm to the embattled Christian population in the region, which today stands on the brink of extinction. From roughly 20 percent at the time of the British mandate in Palestine prior to 1948, the Christian share of the population in Israel and the Palestinian Territories has shrunk to around two percent today.

The visit began as the pontiff arrived in the Jordanian capital of Amman. He met Jordan’s King Abdullah II, visited a local center for disabled youth run by the church which serves a largely Muslim clientele, and then paid a private courtesy visit to Abdullah II and his family at the Royal Palace.

The pope wasted no time expressing his “deep respect for the Muslim community” during the brief welcoming ceremony at Amman’s Queen Alia International Airport.

Jordan in some ways is the closest thing Benedict XVI has to a home court advantage in the Islamic world. The country’s Hashemite monarchy, which claims direct descent from Muhammad, sees itself as the natural leader of the Islamic middle. After the 2006 controversy, Jordan took the lead in getting Catholic/Muslim relations back on track.

Abdullah II broke protocol today to personally greet the pontiff at the airport. Although the king spoke in English, he provided a translation of his address in both Italian and Latin – a rarity on papal travels, and a clear sign of esteem.

In his welcome, Abdullah said that Muslims and Christians must join forces against “voices of provocation” and “ambitious ideologies of division” which “threaten unspeakable suffering.”

Tomorrow, Benedict XVI will visit the King Hussein mosque in Amman, becoming only the second pope to enter a mosque. (John Paul was the first in Damascus, Syria, in 2001.)