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Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided Explores the Dark Side of Positive Thinking

…ow it encourages victim-blaming, political complacency, and a culture-wide flight from realism. “The flip side of positivity is… a harsh insistence on personal responsibility: if your business fails or your job is eliminated, it must be because you didn’t try hard enough, didn’t believe firmly enough in the inevitability of your success,” writes Ehrenreich. “As the economy has brought more layoffs and financial turbulence to the middle class, the…

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Is Joel Osteen, Success Mag Cover Boy, Really “God’s Best”?

…od’s best,” Osteen misses a very important point. Perhaps on his next long flight he can pull out his Bible and take a gander at Luke 16:19-31—the story of Lazarus and the rich man. Daily, the rich man ignored poor Lazarus, but when Lazarus died he was taken to “heaven” or a place of eternal comfort. The rich man’s fate in Hades was terrible, however, as he begged Abraham to “send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; f…

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Capricology: Divine Madness

…s the ability to instantly acquire the skills she needs to get through the flight simulator. She argues in effect that she doesn’t want to do things the easy way; she wants to earn her way through the virtual world. I am reminded of the ongoing debates around multiplayer games about what constitutes cheating and whether it is appropriate for a character to pay real cash to buy a ready-made avatar which can function at higher levels than they have…

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Mitt Romney At Value Voters Summit

…ancy Pelosi’s numbers have being going down a chute faster than a Jet Blue flight attendant” and  “President Obama’s idea of a rogue state is Arizona.”   As for the substance of Romney’s speech, what was most notable was the absence of talk about values, let alone religion.  Instead, Romney sounded every bit the corporate buyout and turnaround specialist, criticizing the “anti-growth,” “anti-investment” Obama administration for forgetting the priv…

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Passover with Mohammed: A Jewish Journalist in Yemen

…ut already has a thick goatee. When I tell him I’m a Jew he takes out his iPhone and wants to play me a song. Hebrew lettering appears on the bottom of the screen and a yarmulke-clad singer stands on a stage, microphone in hand. When he begins singing, in Arabic, Ahmed knows every word. He sings about chewing qat, about falling in love. “Most of the Jews here went to Israel, but they stayed Yemeni—listen to his accent! He’s a perfect Sana’ani. He…

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Getting Back into Blogging

…atable Eiffel tower. That’s how I knew it was partially about the hajj. My flight itinerary is set. I fly directly from San Francisco to Paris, and then from Paris to Jeddah, which is like the port city for hajjis. Apparently in the dream, someone was so anxious to show they had gone through Paris, they sort of took anything—because, clearly in the dream, no merit was ascribed to that particular choice. It was worse than my stop at the tourist kio…

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Updated with Audio: Secular Good, Muslim Bad: Unveiling Tunisia’s Revolution

…ff its nauseating government; in 2008’s Press Freedom Index, Tunisia ranked 164th out of 178 countries. Culturally, Tunisia appeared to have gone in all the right directions, so why had it politically failed? And why didn’t we expect it? It’s because of this mind-map: If an Arab/Muslim is culturally Western, he is naturally in favor of democracy; if culturally other, he is some kind of authoritarian. I’m saying this because of the New York Times’…

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Theocracy: “What Would Be So Bad About It?”

…was made out to be and explains his theodicy as a response to his family’s flight from the Armenian genocide in Turkey. His whole life project was to try to figure out what could protect you. In the end, he came down to the only thing that is solid is God’s law. Well, you say the word law in the 20th or 21st century, and people break out in a rash. I’m not sure why she used the word theodicy — which is an attempt to answer the theological problem…

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Why Evolution Should Be Taught in Church

…ol, to be shut out in the dark, to drift, to face the abyss with no armor. Flight is an utterly human response to mystery. But sometimes the need for control, absolutes, and knowledge careens out of control. To wit: Those who desire to have creationism taught in our nation’s public schools. They know, because the Bible says so; and what’s more, they know so well that they’re going to take control of the educations not only of their own children, b…

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Coming Out on a Christian Campus, Then and Now

…graham—a speaker’s bureau of conservative ideology. When I was there in the 1980s, there is never even any pretense of ideological balance. (Full disclosure: I was chair of the College Republicans. Looking back I’d say that was a pretty effective coping strategy for deeply closeted and conflicted gay man. Full disclosure no. 2: I stopped making contributions to Harding when Bay Buchanan was invited to campus. Alumni loyalty has its limits.) In a 1…

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