Religion Dispatches
…les, Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-Six (Random House, 2009), he spins off the Talmudic idea of the Lamedh-Vov—that, at any moment in time, there are thirty-six saint-like souls on Earth who are anonymous (even to themselves) and link humanity to God. His new book is Virtual Words, just out from Oxford University Press, evolved from his Jargon Watch column in Wired. Though he’s received some blessing from the scientific world—a geneticis…
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…xtreme forms of Christian nationalism. And so the narrative that the media spins, and even some evangelicals, is to classify everybody in the same category, including yours truly.” Panelist Michael Brown said that, while they don’t deny that “abuses” and “aberrations” occur, they want to “burst the bubble of this fictitious NAR conspiracy”—by which he may be referring to the aggressive religious and political ambitions and activities described by…
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…express certainty that the numbers are much higher. “I believe that within Central America, Nicaragua is at the epicenter of the pandemic, and in terms of deaths per capita, the numbers are among the highest in Latin America, comparable to those of Brazil, Peru, and Ecuador,” states Dr. Jorge Huete, a molecular biologist based at Managua’s Universidad Centroamericana. “We can see that cases are growing exponentially due to the abnormally high numb…
Read More…untry was “lost” or what taking it back would actually mean, this rhetoric spins a narrative of a fallen nation as well as a prophecy of a redeemed and perfected one. It is precisely the troubled loners—those who find nothing of value in the present order—who become the most invested in these prophecies. Scholars who study apocalyptic movements long have noted that radical political movements such as Marxism and Nazism are founded on prophecies of…
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…, Clinton is typical of her oft-maligned profession. She bends, shades, or spins the truth on numerous occasions, sometimes for reasons we might applaud, but at other times out of self-interest or a counterproductive penchant for secrecy (see the entry in her biography under “emails”). Here her husband may well have served as a model. Bill Clinton left such a long trail of tale-telling that Christopher Hitchens was able to title his 1999 denunciat…
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…aged readers with Montgomery’s core belief, illustrating again and again a central value of human agency and responsibility. “It’s finally saying to you, you’re involved,” Montgomery said in one of the few interviews he did on the subject. “What are you doing and why are you making these choices?” Montgomery, who died late last year at his home in Vermont, was largely known for his role in turning the CYOA books into a franchise that eventually ex…
Read More…lame on the shooting on the left. Sarah has an earlier post on some of the spins Special Guest is promoting here. Today, the booking site is promoting Ted Shoebat, who says that being an atheist leads one to commit mass murder. “It’s actually very simple,” Shoebat was quoted in Special Guest’s promotion, “When God is not in your life, evil will seek to fill the void.” And who is Shoebat? As Sarah wrote in a post in August: …(He) is the son of “ex-…
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…are subject to evolution, too. It’s possible that natural selection has encoded different behavior patterns in men and women. These differences could show up in proclivities toward certain behaviors. I say possible with a key reservation: even if these proclivities were there, we’d probably be terribly equipped to discern them. There’s no question that male and female roles are deeply conditioned by culture, by physical differences, and by power—…
Read More…ommonwealth both in terms of the ownership of the asset and in terms of the common good of widespread open access. Sometimes free isn’t really free….
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…for Salt Lake City, he donated a pay raise to buy sports equipment for the Central City Community Center, and when the Republicans tried to block the police from forming a union, my dad not only defended their right to it, but also helped them to set it up. My mom was surprised one morning by a Native American gentleman at the doorstep who handed her an envelope full of cash. It turns out that, years before, my dad, a lawyer, had defended the trib…
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