Religion Dispatches
…virulent that hatred has become. Americans are willing to throw religious freedom and tolerance out the window, a posture all too familiar in the nation’s history and sadly contradictory to the sacred principles upon which this country was founded. Opposition to the construction of a Muslim community center in New York; the brutal attack on a Muslim cabbie; the proposed burning of Qur’ans by a small church that created a media sensation; the pass…
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…row in new ways that improve analytical ability, allowing the capacity for better math and money handling skills. Such ability would of course be selected for in centuries’-worth of banking environments. See why this gets folks edgy? A human-created environment (culture) that affects one cultural/religous group (Jews) that might drive genetic change over a relatively short period of time. Harpending, Cochran and others identify many such ‘recent’…
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…e is any passion at all in these recitations, it is a passion in the head. Better than none, I suppose. But if we want to galvanize people who themselves are not struggling around the grim state of the economy, reeling off the facts won’t cut it. People must be invited to engage directly with those who suffer: that is where transformation can begin. So yes, religious progressives should at least try to temper the bad habit of imagining they can r…
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…ted by actual science, is not outside the realm of possibility—and you can bet Cameron knows it. Cameron is among those made-in-America anti-LGBT activists who are exporting the US culture wars (their cause clearly losing at home) to countries where their prejudices are widely accepted, anti-LGBT discrimination is already enshrined into law or could be, and the potential harm from their violent rhetoric is that much greater. For those who may not…
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…it’s less likely to be true. I can appreciate why someone would make that bet. The Great Pumpkin promises not just candy, but toys, maybe money. Linus’s adoring companion Sally seemed to me like the person whose faith is less sincere, but who nevertheless represents many believers as they actually are: tentative, conflicted, self-interested. After a year in which I followed the obsessive investigations into the mind of the Trump voter, my sympath…
Read More…ne system, putting him out of work for a considerable stretch. He lost the bet, and the cancer came back. I’m sure he would have been more than a little surprised to hear that his oncologist was required by state law to evaluate him for “physical, psychological, emotional, demographic, or situational” risk factors before removing his cancer. What he would have made of his doctor asking him if anyone had pressured him to have surgery, I don’t know….
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…s than one full percentage point). And generally speaking, black Americans between the ages of 18-29 are not leaving Christianity and ecclesiastical affiliation. Only among historically black Protestant denominations did that number trend downward significantly between 2007 and 2014; the 18-29 age group decreased from 24 to 20 percent among historically black Protestant denominations. The number of 18-29 year olds among Catholics and evangelical P…
Read More…pride in our great nation.” Learn Our History’s messages are all geared to promoting the idea of American Exceptionalism, and from the clips, they appear to be delivered with all the subtlety and Cold War fervor of the movie Red Dawn. From Learn Our History web site’s Frequently Asked Questions: What does it mean that Learn Our History is “unbiased”? Learn Our History’s products have been developed to correct the “blame America first” attitude pre…
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…hen our resolve to develop an ever better understanding of seismology? You bet. Do these guarantee that, going forward into an age of accelerating climate change and rapidly depleting oil reserves, we won’t take one hit after another to our most deeply-held belief as modern people: that we can do a better job of running the planet than the planet can? No. There is no guarantee whatsoever that we will emerge from this century with our pride of spec…
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…US context, its shape and content would have been much different. You can bet, for example, that von Hauswolff’s claim that “Catholic integralism won over art, but not over love” would have been “balanced” with a proponent of integralism explaining why Catholicism is a more authentic expression of the French identity than the music of an agnostic Swede. But more importantly, omissions like this demonstrate just how flawed the Times’ typical cover…
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