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On Pi Day, Puzzling Over the Most Famous Transcendental Number

…Physicsworld.com user asks, “What could be more mystical than an imaginary number interacting with real numbers to produce nothing?” Where infinity merges with the earth When you dig into pi, you encounter questions that are as much theological as mathematical: is there a pattern to the universe? Or is it fundamentally random? And how do we reckon with the infinite? Some people have always insisted that there must be a pattern behind pi. If only h…

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What Makes a Human Bomb Tick?

…y is that it is not limited to religiopolitical violence. Lankford cites a number of American suicide terrorists that exhibited “classic suicidal traits.” Like Joseph Stack, a divorced software engineer with tax problems. In 2010, Stack crashed his single-engine plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, killing himself and an IRS manager; “There isn’t enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken [with me],” Stack wrote in the…

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The March for Life: Grassroots Movement or Agitprop?

…for Life President Jeanne Mancini told the Times: I don’t think that these numbers are the most important. The number most important for us is 58 million, which is the number of Americans that have been lost to abortion. But either they have the numbers or they don’t. And if they don’t, maybe the media should take a hard look at how it covers a predictable, lightly attended act of agitprop which claims to represent hundreds of thousands of people…

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From Shofars to Hammers: The Spiritual Warriors of MAGA are ‘ReAwakening’ to Political Violence

…the dominant brand of today’s Republican Party. For good reason, a growing number of expert observers have begun sounding the alarm. I suggest it’s time we hit the panic button. The rally featured plenty of repugnant elements—from the relentless attacks on transgender youth consistent with fascist scapegoating, to the steady drumbeat of election fraud claims, to accusations that Dr. Fauci engineered Covid-19 in a Chinese lab to help a demonic caba…

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As Long As There’s Fear, We Aren’t Ready for Atheism: A Conversation with Theologian and Ex-Priest Daniel Maguire

…in the morning and seeing the sun shine and the sky blue and the birds in flight and saying, ‘Thank you God,’ and you’re taking that away from me.” You write “theism promises simplicity and security and delivers neither,” but you do refer to a world that was “not yet ready for atheism.” Do you believe the world is now ready for atheism? As long as there is fear, it will never be fully ready. Fear makes you reach for a supernatural insurance polic…

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Crowdsourced Catholicism: New iPhone App Lets Users Forgive Sins

…hen accused him of forging his evidence. Another was thrown out of a strip club for saying “God must hate strippers” to a dancer who confided that she had a disabled son. Here and there, Penance hurts. Between the cheap jokes and bourgeois self-loathing are murmurs worth hearing, if only as microfiction. Likewise, the app’s agnosticism facilitates a lucid tableau of spontaneous popular theology. Of the 24 confessions, only one references God as an…

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Playing Hooky: Will Boycott of Catholic Church Spur Reform?

…Christ on Earth. According to Catholic teaching, mass isn’t just a social club meeting, and it certainly isn’t a product. It’s the Lord’s Supper, a mystical encounter with God in community. Before receiving the eucharist, we offer one another the sign of peace, putting aside all that divides us, whatever it is. The bread and wine we use is materially cheap and unsatisfying; what we experience in them is supposed to come from a wealth beyond. In t…

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After Orlando: Love Wins, But When?

…ut the same law that buys a venison steak in the Great Northwoods brings a cheap Taurus pistol to Baltimore, to people who also feel unheard and neglected. (Never mind the strange psychology of the “lone wolf.”) So the freedom to live without threat and the freedom to own a gun are at odds. Someone will have to win and someone will have to lose. I mean this quite literally. The only way to have meaningful gun control will be to vote people out of…

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National Association of Evangelicals Supports Immigration Reform, But Elsewhere Discord Reigns

…ove to enjoy your gifts because we know you have them. But only (pick your number) Mexicans or Ecuadorians or whoever can be welcomed this year.” Rereading the Scripture and changing our tone of voice will go a long way. “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt…

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Pop-Eye: Meat The Wrestler

…ssidy” (Marissa Tomei) is also portrayed as meat, working at a local strip club easily imagined as a neighbor of Tony Soprano’s “Bada Bing” in Noplace, New Jersey. Cassidy and Randy both use their bodies, and are praised and employed for that reason, and that reason alone. Their meat is ogled and evaluated as it gyrates, bumps, humps, withstands abuse—all while having to meet certain standards of an accepting, usually discriminating public who pay…

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