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The Sacred and the Dead: Operator, Can You Help Me?

…nny familiarity given our distance in physical space and time. I sang in a new church recently where the pastor realized she knew my name from somewhere. “Are you friends with the Hackett family on Facebook?” she asked. “Yes,” I replied. That’s how she knew me. Virtually. Through pixels on a screen and shared aquaintances. Like Pound, I sometimes find it effervescently exciting, all this connection. I’m thoroughly guilty both of offering too much…

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Bill O’Reilly’s Biblical Misremembering

…s “confirmed fabrications” deepens. In the cases of these larger-than-life newsmen the factual infidelity had been allowed to persist for years despite those reporters and members of the military who knew the truth. None of this should come as a surprise to those who have an understanding of the power of narrative over our lives. Joseph Campbell has explored this ad nauseam in his analysis of the function of myth, and in The Gulf War Did Not Take…

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Freezing Our Way to a Fiery Hell?

…a chaotic system. For businesses tied to the weather-closing status of the New York City Public Schools, there’s yet another ethical element. During one of New York’s worst storms—last year—Mayor de Blasio kept the schools open in horrendous travel conditions. One of the reasons given? Many children get their only hot meal of the day at school. We have to force kids to school so they can eat a square meal? And Zuccotti Park was cleared out years a…

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west bank mural

A One-State Solution for Israel and Why It Will Work

…is quickly closing. It is not true that, as Thomas Friedman writes in the New York Times (‘Netanyahu Will Make History’), that there is either ‘only one state,’ in which Israel ‘cannot be Jewish,’ or a two-state solution, an Israel and Palestine living side-by-side. Get over it, folks. Not happening. The time for a two-state solution passed in the previous millennium. Friedman didn’t just miss the window of opportunity, he’s missed the closing cr…

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The Promise of Immortality in a Tech-Enhanced Heaven

….U. Sirius: I’ll answer the first part, since it was my idea. I did an A-Z User’s Guide to the New Edge back in 1993, introducing the then-novel ideas of a cyberculture or cyberpunk — the idea that the digital revolution was changing everything. We’ve seen that happen. The entire world and its economy has moved online, speeding things up, “disrupting” industries, increasing our vulnerability to hackers and spies. Now we’re at the beginnings of fee…

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Who Is “Sam Bacile?”

…sn’t even begin to describe the 13-minute trailer on YouTube. The film was promoted by anti-Muslim zealot Terry Jones. The WSJ reported yesterday: The film’s 52-year-old writer, director and producer, Sam Bacile, said that he wanted to showcase his view of Islam as a hateful religion. “Islam is a cancer,” he said in a telephone interview from his home. “The movie is a political movie. It’s not a religious movie.” Mr. Bacile said he raised $5 milli…

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Why Go to Church If You Don’t Believe Anymore?

…. Still, I come. But this year, unlike other years (that year when, hope renewed for a time, I wrote a book celebrating what courageous women were doing to change this punishing, patriarchal church), this year, my faith is gone. I can see a time when this awesome church will be an awesome museum, a monument to beliefs long discredited, as alien to future human beings as the gods of Greek mythology are to us. But this journey, this way of the cross…

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Terror In South Carolina

…nfederate flag still flies, and in museums where secession is treated as an essential part of the state’s history, and sanitized as disassociated from anything having to do with race or slavery. In his floor speech, Pinckney referred to the body cameras as “new eyes for seeing” for the doubting Thomases. No doubt he keenly understood how those new eyes are needed metaphorically as well, something that, tragically, will require repeating as we seek…

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dungeonsanddragons

My Childhood Hobby Was Satanic, Or So They Told Me

…on that allows us to think about both role-playing games and religion in a new light. Of course D&D isn’t a “religion” in the way that moral entrepreneurs claimed: players are not actually worshipping deities, casting spells, etc. But something about the game made them think of religion and I think it’s worth asking what that was. I also think these games can be a lot more than just “escapism.” I found a lot of cases of gamers who found these game…

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Israel Under Bush: The Islamophobia Years

…inker, but also holds the respect of fairly conservative Zionists like The New Republic’s Martin Peretz. So what was this about? As Colin Powell put it when he declared his support for Obama, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being an American Muslim—but to suggest as much is. To go one step further and target a secular, educated Arab American as though he embodied of every possible concern ‘average Americans’and Jews supposedly have about Mu…

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