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Will the Taliban Actually Remain Somewhat Moderate This Time?

…since the North Vietnamese military had attacked it, and in fact the last American soldiers to lose their lives in the war were defending the airport. After that last helicopter flight not a single person was evacuated by the US military. The “boat people” who fled Vietnam did so on their own. By contrast the Taliban has been remarkably patient. The airport hasn’t been bombarded, and tens of thousands of Afghan people have been able to board US m…

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Faith and Football: What the Gospel Church Can Learn from the NFL

…a disproportionate impact here is that for years now, the holy trinity of American professional athletics—football, baseball, and basketball—has seemed largely impervious to the broader movement toward gay and lesbian acceptance in most other sectors of mainstream culture (not for nothing did Kluwe participate in an October radio panel titled “The Gay Jackie Robinson”—as in, professional sports needs one). This imperviousness to progress has seem…

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Defying Gravity Defies Sci-Fi Conventions

…nning to reach toward the stars, we were becoming emotional androids. “Our flight must be not only to the stars but into the nature of our own beings,” Dick wrote. “Because it is not merely where we go, to Alpha Centauri or Betelgeuse, but what we are as we make our pilgrimages there. Our natures will be going there, too. Ad astra— but per hominem.” That, in a sense, is the fundamental concern of ABC’s hard-SF soap opera Defying Gravity. The show…

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The Racial Politics of Atheism

…at was supposed to be the original site of the Academy Awards.  Post white-flight in the sixties and seventies Inglewood became a predominantly African American community. It now “boasts” an eclectic array of faith institutions from Church of Scientology storefronts to mosques. I think the cover evokes many of the book’s themes about whiteness, innocence and redemption; bringing it full circle to the last chapter which explores the racial politics…

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Makers of Depopulation Doc Have a Past

…ocations to come: In Pittsburgh, reports The New York Times, deaths now outnumber births and hospitals are closing obstetrics wards or converting them to acute care for the elderly. In fact, as The New York Times wrote in the same piece, the phenomenon is less Children of Men than Roger & Me, with the closing of rustbelt factories as a prime cause of the flight of young families with children, while at the same time senior citizens started returni…

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Pope Francis Brokers End to Cuba Embargo, Despite Opposition of Catholic Pols

…ile, I think, an island-colony. We can reach it by a thirty-minute charter flight from Miami, yet never reach it at all.” Today, Cuba is more in our reach. As a Cuban-American from Miami I have been raised amidst the existential crisis of the Cuban exile community, a community with a rabid anger towards the Castro regime and simultaneous love and compassion for their fellow Cubans on the island. I, like many children of exiles, was raised holding…

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Claude, Adieu: A Farewell to Lévi-Strauss

…along the way of describing his repeated trips to Brazil in the 1930s, his flight from France after the Nazis overran the country in 1940 (he fought in that failed French attempt to hold the Maginot Line against the German Blitz), and his happenstance return to Brazil (he was granted a visa to come to the New School of Social Research in New York, but got held up in French Martinique, and eventually made his way back to Brazil where he sat out the…

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My Congregation Tried to Help a Syrian Family Settle in the US

…It does make me wonder, though, what would happen if this family got their flight waivers tomorrow and showed up next week. Would they be redirected to Connecticut like the family turned away from Indiana this week? Would they face open hostility, suspicion, even violence, as Muslims in many states have? Would my parishioners still want to befriend them, or would they be cowed or converted by the mean-spirited rhetoric that has been flying loose r…

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That Mercenary Feeling: What the Apparently Unlimited Use of “Contractors” Says About American Empire in Afghanistan and Iraq

…e often triple or quadruple those of a corresponding soldier or Marine was cheaper or more expensive for the American taxpayer.” Excuse me? “No one really knows”?? I’m not an economist, but even I know: it’s clearly more expensive in the direct cost-per-individual sense, and it is vastly more expensive in terms of the cost to the way our massive and growing presence in that very poor country is perceived by the locals. I’m not the first to suggest…

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“We Found My Father, Except for His Hand”

…y of their places of murder. What would I have found in Srebrenica? But my flight arrived too late. Although we had access, we would’ve arrived well after the commemorations, and may have missed the chance to meet the people who needed to be talked to—by then many would’ve been on the return trip to Sarajevo. More than that, in the face of the thousands making the return trip before nightfall, we may have been forced to spend the night. Bosnia has…

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