Is Trying Really Good Enough? ‘The Good Place’ Has a C-word Problem
On October 8th, 2019, Jameela Jamil, one of the lead actresses on the surprising hit…
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Irony Repeats Itself: Reconsidering Reinhold Niebuhr in the Trump Era
For the third time in this young century, Reinhold Niebuhr is getting another splash of…
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A Moral Galaxy: War and Suffering in “Star Wars: The Old Republic”
A new Star Wars film premieres this week, accompanied by the kind of social ferment…
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The Ethics of Everest
In the wake of tragedy, considering both the human and the moral costs of the ultimate sports pilgrimage.
Read MoreThe Google Question of Evil
The slogan “Don’t be evil” prompts questions Google’s chairman seems ill-equipped to answer.
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An Evangelical Intellectual Takes On Same-Sex Marriage, Grasps at Straw Men
Though Craig is correct that his argument is “simple,” he is wrong to believe that simplicity makes it good. Indeed, the suggestion that terms and concepts are immune to redefinition is simply… false. It demands an unflattering comparison to Rick Santorum, who once stumped around the nation declaring that a “napkin is a napkin.”
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Inventing “Jihad”
Last week, in the wake of Russian-led investigation, it was reported that when Tamerlan Tsarnaev was in Russia he was, in fact, more eager to wage war than the Islamist contacts he had traveled to find. Accounts reveal that he arrived in Russia with “an avid interest in waging jihad.”
Read MoreThe Contraceptive Mandate and Animal Suffering
Peter Singer: if your religious beliefs don’t permit it, don’t do it.
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Eat, Pray, Kill: The Basic Brutality of Eating
When it comes to the consumption of meat, our human hands have long been dirty. This isn’t a discouragement to stop striving for the good. But a moral proposal that promises to wash our filthy fingers spotlessly clean—in seconds flat—is suspect. Because they will still be dirty. The pressing moral question, of meat, becomes: given that human hands are obviously soiled, what can be done with these polluted tools?
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Cone of Shame: A Spiritual Crisis in the Humanities
We humans are, today, animals like any other. We always have been. Our culture, however, appears designed to culminate in a magnificently human apex. This has long been a problem when it comes to legal rights. I know I don’t have to explain that the fight for animal rights has fanned the flame of much heated political controversy. And I won’t take an ethical position on that now. Because I’m pointing to something else that, I think, is increasingly under fire: the powerful, dreamlike, quasi-trance state driven by that powerful myth of being human.
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