The Revelation of Kurt Andersen: With ‘Evil Geniuses’ a Media Mandarin Discovers Plutocracy
When I showed up at New York’s Judson Church in 1994 at least some of…
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Climate Change is a Sin—Here’s How to Repent For It
The mistake isn’t that progressives don’t see climate change as a sin. We do, even if we don’t call it that. The mistake is that we respond to it the wrong way.
Read MoreAre the Culture Wars Over? Look at the States
It’s still too soon to say social conservatives are finished.
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Toward a Non-Malignant Faith: An Interview with Brian McLaren
What McLaren is after is a Christian faith that is not automatically hostile to other faiths and to no faith: he calls this “strong-benevolent” Christianity, observing along the way that only active peacemakers can really claim to be connected to God with any real degree of credibility—a point that should be obvious but isn’t.
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Undercover-ed Religion: 13 Stories That Went Missing in 2012
An RD holiday sampler of stories & viewpoints we would have liked to read in 2012.
Patriotism and Piety—Not For Conservatives Only
Haidt’s primary point is actually a good one: people on all sides of the political debate ought to listen more carefully, and try harder to understand one another. He correctly identifies a cardinal sin of so many liberals and lefties: failing to give conservatives an honest hearing. But it’s lousy strategy. If you want to win, you’ve got to have the best possible intelligence about what the other side is up to.
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Why 9/11 Changed Everything Nothing
The cliché that 9/11 “changed everything” is nowhere less true than in the post-9/11 impulse to declare war immediately. War was a choice as well as an echo: a choice Americans made, and an echo of how Americans have made decisions in times of previous conflict.
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Were You Born Selfish?: An Interview with Frans de Waal
Both the good and bad in our species come from our primate background, says primatologist Frans de Waal, author of The Age of Empathy.
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Conservatism’s Bulldog Claims Psychology Tilts Liberal
If you haven’t heard of Jonathan Haidt yet, you probably will soon. The social psychologist from the University of Virginia is making quite a media splash. Most recently, he set off a small media storm by calling out his fellow psychologists for unacknowledged liberal bias.
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Grace Under Pressure: Reclaiming Hope for Progressive Religion
If progressive religious believers are going to provide any kind of witness to our diverse society we must reclaim the idea of “hope” from the realm of politics. Hope, as theology, is not only about finding common purpose, but about liberation.
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