Religion Dispatches
…on a GoPro camera (in that light, the company’s slogan, Be a HERO, seems chilling). It would be wrong to ignore these shooters—their acts have enormous consequences—but you feel complicit, somehow, when you pay attention to them, too. In Reno, Clinton may have made a sharp political calculation. As William Saletan argues, the candidate seems to be pushing establishment Republicans to exit Trump’s orbit, and offering them a frame for the schism. Th…
Read More
…e.” Philippines: First trans lawmaker urges support for nondiscrimination bill Geraldine Roman, the first transgender legislator in the Philippines, urged her colleagues in the House of Representatives to pass a bill outlawing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Norway: Changing gender ‘as easy as filing a tax return’ Associated Press reports that a person can now change their legal gender in Norway as easily as…
Read More
…s of Ligonier’s 2020 State of Theology Survey with respect to evangelical respondents’ attitudes and trends may or may not precisely reflect America’s evangelical population. Nevertheless, the project and its packaging neatly illustrate white evangelicals’ political and social concerns, and they certainly do nothing to call into question the likelihood that the white evangelical electorate will once again give Donald Trump 80% or more of its vote….
Read More
…a Christian way in those different mountains. So they would not say, ‘we killed her.’ They would say, ‘God killed her. Based on our prayers.’ Parker’s interview with Prophet Enlow drew eyeballs after Media Matters and NBC reported on it. In the piece, Enlow is referred to as an “evangelist”—something he took offense to. According to Taylor, this speaks to the importance of these titles within the NAR: Enlow said, “well, I’m actually a prophetic l…
Read More…tion, they distributed “6 million voter guides, 8 million mail pieces, 15 million phone calls, 500,000 doors knocked on by volunteers, and radio advertising covering 56 congressional districts and 22 U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races,” they are now (apparently as I write this) surveying voters to learn “who went to the polls and why.” Instructive for those of us who follow the influence of the religious right on the tea party movement (arguing t…
Read More
…t there is nothing wrong with you, if they reject who you are, because it will make you question yourself, but there are people out there who will care about you, and build you up. While more and more people are leaving religion, we still don’t know much about individuals who leave fundamentalist, strict religions, and how their coming-out process impacts their well being. The social implications of this phenomenon are important. Religion continue…
Read More
…e universe. Given the fact that we’ll have A.I. in two hundred years that will potentially be a million times smarter than us, it could expand through the universe very quickly. I wrote this article suggesting that the very first artificial intelligence that came into being in the universe may have created a system where it would have killed itself and built into this system what I call the “singularity disparity” where no other singularity could…
Read More
…isingly, Sir Thomas Mores among royal favorites are few and far between. Still rarer are still feistier prophets like the Bible’s Nathan, willing to front the king in his chamber and shout “You are the man!” in the face of royal criminality. I understand that Obama craves and needs spiritual counsel. But in my judgment, it is the high-placed pastors who are willing to have our newspaper of record identify them as the ones providing such counsel wh…
Read More
…, to a large extent, unmapped: the terra incognita in our skulls. Over the phone, Eagleman spoke with The Cubit about traumatic brain injuries, the idea of possibilianism, and the language we use to describe our brains. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. In The Brain, you do a good job of depicting the fragility of our experience of reality. Am I right to be a little scared by this instability? [Laughs] Well, you know, it’s one…
Read More…hundreds of thousands of dollars into the Nevada Senate race — along with several others like it — to achieve conservative victory. This plan includes running statewide television and radio ads, sending direct mail to targeted voters, and operating phone banks — all geared toward defeating Harry Reid in November. DeMint apparently does not think the Reconstructionists are an irrelevant fringe movement, as many others seem to think, since he’s pai…
Read More