Whiteville: Endgame
I have previously written about the water tower cross in Whiteville, Tennessee three times: here, here, and here. The story is pretty much over now. On August 8, 2012, the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the...
Category: Religion
The Good Book
While I was away traversing the mighty jungles of mid-town Manhattan, I had the chance to see The Book of Mormon. Even if you aren’t a theatre person, chances are you’ve still heard of...
Markets Are The New Culture
I do love A Bit of Fry & Laurie. This is quite a brilliant sketch, whatever you make of its politics. Maybe not quite as good as their free-market-police bit, but right up there.
Culture is the villain
I’ve had this sort of nebulous notion that culture itself is a problem. Not any particular culture, mind you, but rather the entire concept of culture. The exclusivity of the group over the individual....
Talk radio, taxes, and the Bible
~by M.A. Conor P. Williams, in Conservatism Isn’t Radical—It’s “Modular”, argues that there is a certain amount of mental jiu-jitsu involved in shifting frameworks from argument to argument. An interesting test of this very case...
Hexalogue
A certain kind of religious activist takes it as a given, and as an imperative, that the Decalogue must be displayed prominently on and in public buildings. Gratefully, these folks are rare; sadly, they have influence...
Art, Morality, Music, and Fallout Open Open Thread
We were arguing about art at work in the lab the other day. Not the aesthetic value argument (though that *IS* a good one) but about whether art could be moral in any meaninful...
What are women for?
I keep trying to better understand James Poulos. I like James a great deal, though we disagree pretty fundamentally on many things. I’ve been fascinated by his discussions of the Pink Police State (a conservative...
A (Long) Musing On The New Contraception Rule
There’s been a long and somewhat intense discussion going on in the comments over at Kyle’s sub-blog about the Obama administration’s rule requiring Catholic institutions to provide coverage for contraception in their health care...
How Finding a Job is Like Losing Your Keys
“Who do you think made the first stone spear? That wasn’t the yakkity yaks sitting around the campfire. It was some Asperger sitting in the back of a cave figuring out how to chip...
Fantasy and the Anglosphere
When I published my fantasy piece in the Atlantic it was linked (reproduced?) by Richard Dawkins’ site and a number of the atheists in the commentariat had scathing things to say about fantasy literature....
Going Valjean
Balloon Juice defines “going Galt” as: Withdrawing one’s unique brilliance from the economy in protest of tax rates which are actually abnormally low for the post-war era. Discussed and encouraged by bloggers such as...
Rick Perry’s Christian America
~by Tom Van Dyke Well, the problem isn’t perhaps-GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry attending a semi-political prayer meeting. This stuff happens all the time. [His playing Pontifex Maximus for it and the potential political...
“Yuck” a Duck
~by RTod On Wednesday Erik posted a picture of two (presumably) married costumed lesbians, kissing while holding a sign saying Liberty, a sign saying Justice, and a child that is either from the Village...
Living According to a Story
By Kyle Cupp I was born to a Buddhist father and a somewhat lapsed Catholic mother, so you could say I had a divergent and confusing theological upbringing. Essentially I heard two different stories...
Muslims Don’t Need Better PR, Americans Need More Tolerance
The last time I checked, most Muslims in the United States were not blowing themselves up in suicide attacks against their fellow Americans. They were not issuing fatwas against Harry Potter or converting your...
On God Complexes, Neoconservatives and Libya
~ by Sean Byrnes As I imagine is the case in many religious services, the biblical readings of a Roman Catholic Mass in any given week tend to all relate to some central theme...
The weird ideological inversion of the school reform debate
At one of our excellent sub-blogs, Alex Knapp makes this commonsensical point: We live in a country where Creationists can run for President without being laughed out of the room, homeopathy is seen as...
Zeal of a Convert
I mentioned a month or so ago that since my engagement, I’ve sort of re-channeled the views I usually apply to politics into everyday living. “Re-channeled” might be a bit much – I can...
Abortion and Slavery again
Ta-Nehisi has pushed once again into the abortion and slavery debate, this time following the invocation of that analogy by Rick Santorum and Joe Klein’s subsequent defense of Santorum’s rhetoric. Now, I’ve admitted in...
