Religion Dispatches
If Scientists are the West’s last priestly class then Freeman Dyson might be our greatest heretic. Nicholas Dawidoff’s profile of the brilliant physicist in the New York Times Magazine illuminates a man who has always sought to subvert scientific consensus—most recently in denying the dangers of climate change and CO2 emissions. The story’s title, “The Civil Heretic,” signals the ghost of religion hanging in the background. It is the “secular rel…
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…thers were ethical: the ‘common sense’ notions we took apart in philosophy class, the simplistic myths of religion. Others, for lack of a better word, were questions of style. Sentiment, saccharine, Hallmark Cards, kitties with big eyes, immaculate suburban lawns, patriotism, douchey fashion accessories, believing in the bromides of politicians—I can’t quite pinpoint what all of these had in common, except that they were cheap, over-simplified, an…
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…Amendment rights by proselytizing religion and teaching creationism in the classroom. But it also raises the separate issue of battery because of the cross burn, which, Mansfield notes, feeds back into the Establishment Clause issues. Freshwater has filed a counterclaim against the Dennis family, as well as a separate lawsuit against the district, alleging religious discrimination, defamation, conspiracy, and breach of contract. One of the truly w…
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…week, Alabama’s governor signed a bill that makes performing an abortion a Class A felony, punishable by up to 99 years in prison. Unlike the Georgia bill, Alabama’s doesn’t include exceptions for rape and incest. While other states consider similar legislation, the timing of these bills is no accident. Their constitutionality will certainly be questioned, but that’s the entire point: force the fight to a conservative Supreme Court, which many thi…
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…these days they are going to write the whole thing up and read it to their class and find out if there is anyone who wants to join them. No one is going to listen to what their teachers have to say, or their parents, or the people who write books and articles in the newspaper and can’t think of anything except the same old things nobody believes in. Peace conferences in Madrid, declarations of principles, Cairo agreements, Washington agreements, r…
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…ed by my grandparents. It’s easy to dismiss a theory you have to learn for class when it’s applied to a bird, but here’s a disease that was passed down to me genetically from my parents. Here’s a disease introduced into the population by way of a protective allele (if you have two ‘bad’ copies of the sickle-cell gene, you are very sickly and tend to die young, but the original mutation has stuck around because those with one bad copy of the gene,…
Read More…igan that the evocatively named Macon “Milkman” Dead calls home; the cross-class relationship between two African Americans in Tar Baby; and A Mercy, with its accounts of how a pandemic decimated the indigenous people. And of course, there is her masterpiece(s), the loosely connected trilogy of Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise. It’s crucial to remember that Morrison’s transcendent genius was the product of black culture, black vernacular, black religio…
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…ibrary and Museum. Military green dominates the portrait of Sergeant First Class Scott Alan Adams Sr., who served in the United States Army from 1986 to 2008—green background, green eyes, green shirt, green in his hair and eyebrows. Bush’s essay tells how, in January of 2007, during Adams’ fifth deployment, his vehicle hit two landmines laced with white phosphorous, a chemical compound that causes terrible burns. Adams was knocked unconscious and…
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…ns and airtime, Trump is the natural outgrowth of disaffected post-working class isolationism combined with Reagan-era economics. Those characterizations might be partly true but they fail to capture some of the more lasting features of this America, an America whose several discreditings and multiform rage has left all watching scrambling to find an account of things that would make sense of institutional racism, gunplay, Islamophobia, Bernie Bro…
Read More…os Angeles, she recalled, would sometimes reach out to feel her head for horns. Late in her life, she and I talked about homosexuality—we talked about everything—and she recalled back in the 1950s a boy who grew up on her block in her middle-class Los Angeles suburb, a child who she always knew was different, and kindly she asked, “I wonder what has happened to him? I wonder if everything turned out okay for him?” Kindness was the core of her Morm…
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