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This Narrative of Death that is So Powerful Among Us

…zmos that I’m carrying around with me. [pointing to digital recorder, cell phone, iTouch] Walter: That’s right. I think he’s the primary voice who anticipated all of this. It seems to me he is vindicated over and over and over again, that technology is not neutral, but that it brings an ideology with it. Dan: I’m more familiar with that from Niebuhr, who resists the “technic,” he says, and is more oriented to political science and economics, and s…

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Looking For Answers at the Oscars: A Guide to This Year’s Contenders

…etimes communication technologies facilitated that friendship (a letter, a phone call). In the new age the structure is reversed as friendships are built upon those very communication technologies. We are now databases, plugged into a network. Face-to-face friendships have become interface friendships.   A more ethereal ethernet was evoked in Inception. Here too people are linked to each other through a social network, and here too identities are…

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Walking Dead and Zombie Ethics, or “Don’t Fight the Zombies. You Can’t Win”

…r becomes the key to global salvation. The disruption of this white middle class family’s life appears alongside global collapse, and I am unsure which the film wants us to care about more. Zekes are clearly a dangerous threat, and the film plays on existing fears of global pandemics, terrorism, and the breakdown of governments and infrastructure. World War Z does not attempt to humanize the monsters, nor does it register concern for the masses of…

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Star Trek: Politics Anti-Matters

…began, actually, in the show’s original 1966 pilot, in which the character Number One (played by creator Gene Roddenberry’s wife, Majel Barrett) showed none of the emotional hysteria expected of onscreen women at the time. Deemed too racy by the network, her demeanor was given to Spock, the half-Vulcan who spent the next three years’ worth of episodes struggling to stay logical amid the raging passions of his friends. While Spock was always trying…

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Obama to Cave on Bush Tax Cuts: Letter to the Washingtonians, Chapter 1

…as a compromise, a letter to the Washingtonians… To the moderate political classes, religious leaders, and activists who are tempted after the Republican gains in the 2010 midterms to call for more compromise, civility, and government sensitivity to the plight of “the least of these”: Late in the year 2000, I stayed up late into the night watching election returns. The hope for a Gore presidency went down hard, like sparks struck from a flint. At…

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Angry Voters, Right-Wing Populism, & Racial Violence: People of Faith Can Help Break the Linkages

…e supremacist movements.” I catch up with the Rev. David Ostendorf by cell phone while he is waiting for a plane at an East Coast airport. He is the executive director of the CNC where Ward works. Ostendorf, A United Church of Christ minister, once led PrairieFire Rural Action, a group that tried to save family farms during a major agricultural economic crisis in the 1980s. “Back then we helped build a popular economic political movement among fam…

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Becoming Forever Lonesome: How Violence Changes Us

…universals. In a super white, super loud flash… or a DJ’s croon… or a telephone’s brrng brrng, when you become forever lonesome. Because you know the real secret. Anything can happen. Aliens could land. ***  Among the outrages of living in a time of violence is that victims feel the need to rank their suffering. “What I suffered pales in comparison,” the Aurora victim who tramped over his dead girlfriend, who still has shrapnel in his own body, t…

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The ‘Evolving’ Story of Teacher Who Burned Cross into Student’s Arm

…ss branded on their kid might be perceived that way. “We are religious people,” they said in a statement after they filed suit in June. “But we were offended when Mr. Freshwater burned a cross onto the arm of our child. This was done in science class in December 2007, where an electric shock machine was used to burn our child.” Dennis sighs on the phone when she thinks back on the past two years. “It’s changed our lives,” she said. “But I think we…

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How the COVID-19 Pandemic May Permanently Change Our ‘Good Death’ Narrative

…the U.S. have reached 205,172 with 4,540 deaths caused by the virus. These numbers change by the hour. (Italy’s death toll is currently over 13,000.) In nearly every way, these statistics subvert the potential for a Good Death as most of us would imagine it. But we’re not the first to experience such disruption. The sudden death of the Good Death Drew Gilpin Faust describes the Good Death in mid-19th century America as a part of respectable middle…

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The End of Trust: YouTube, Lies and Videotape

…see them all together in this video.” He goes to a different Sunday School class. Oh, and here’s what I wrote to my great aunt: Dear Aunt “E”, I agree, as Christians we have fallen down on our job, but the content presented in this video is troubling to me, and not for the same reasons as it may be to you. There are any number of fact-checking errors with this video — the sources are unviewable in detail, and when they are discernible, they refer…

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