Why The Advocate‘s Choice of Pope Francis for Person of the Year is a Mistake
…Pope Francis as much as anyone, I need concrete actions to back up the sentiments. Until the dogma changes, talk is cheap….
Read More…Pope Francis as much as anyone, I need concrete actions to back up the sentiments. Until the dogma changes, talk is cheap….
Read More…aafa 21 quotes from a letter in which she wrote of the need for a “simple, cheap, safe contraceptive to be used in poverty-stricken slums, jungles, and among the most ignorant people. I believe that now, immediately there should be national sterilization for certain dysgenic types of our population who are being encouraged to breed and would die out were the government not feeding them.” These words are noxious, but it’s also important to put them…
Read More…ood from as much of the world as possible, in land, natural resources, and cheap labor. What does it mean to be born in a place that measures your value, your worth, your very life by the calculus of possession? That calculus extends through time to us from those founding greed-filled moments invading our waking consciousness and driving us forward in a strange confession. We believe in competition born of the desire to possess. We believe in stri…
Read More…nremarkable button marked “God made proteins.” But salvation is not such a cheap, glib thing. Those who are serious about salvation are serious about creating the conditions of genuine ease and assurance for others in the face of their deepest terrors and despairs. What this requires is much more difficult, interesting, and rewarding than trying to win the same tired arguments about the structure of molecules. What is needed, for theists and athei…
Read MoreTalk is cheap, and sentimental talk cheapens public discourse in dangerous ways at a time when total sobriety is required. Eight weeks into a public health and economic catastrophe, the facts before us should be sobering enough: Disease and death in this pandemic overwhelmingly afflict communities of color (e.g. despite making up just a third of the state’s population, 70% of the dead in Louisiana have been African American; in Michigan the numbe…
Read More…ast two decades, more than 1.4 million people moved to Nevada in search of cheap housing and boom-time fueled hospitality, tourism, and construction jobs, more than doubling the state’s population. Now, those speculation-and-spending fueled good times are gone. That volatility does not treat mild-mannered Mormon politicians well: be they Reids, or Romneys. Just last week, Jan Shipps, a longtime scholar and canny observer of Mormon experience, wage…
Read More…llow Arabs, demonized and derided for years, such that their blood becomes cheap. This happens all too often with minorities; what is unique about the Arab world is the degree to which many dictatorships also oppress the majority. My point in that essay about Tunisia was that we in America and the West generally reflexively associate secularism with what is good and democratic, and conservatism (specifically, in Islam) with that which is antidemo…
Read More…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…
Read More…y well. So Disney’s take on life in New Orleans and the bayou is at best a cheap commercial ploy, and at worst, a revisionist religious and racist nightmare. Yes, I know, it’s just fantasy, right? But your kids are going to be in my classroom later, and I am going to have to deconstruct this mess. Note: spoilers ahead. If you want to see the mess, stop here. The New Orleans and the Louisiana Bayou that Disney’s writers have concocted for viewer pl…
Read More…story of right-wing defeat and liberalism ascendant doesn’t unravel like a cheap suit on a blue dog Dem voting more money for the war. “Fundamentalism” is bigger than Ted Haggard, bigger than Jerry Falwell, bigger than the president, who, if defectors from his regime are to be believed, has lost all but a sliver of his religion. It’s bigger and older and more enduring than the political coalition currently called the “Christian Right,” soon to be…
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