Yesterday, Judith Warner posted an op-ed at the NYT, “Holier Than They,” that has drawn so far 108 comments. Upon reading the piece and the comments, I came away with conflicting thoughts: I agree completely, and this is all wrong. In essence, Warner is challenging Christians–specifically “conservative” Christians–to reexamine the tenets of their faith to…
This is serious, by the way: Apparently sh*t happens due to something like the darwinian “Origin of Feces“? Every now and then, science puts forth a theory that — at least on a bitterly cold December day, with a flu infection stirring fatigue in a certain science journalist — resonates with grand poetic truth. The…
Metanexus Institute fosters an intellectual and spiritual movement of more than 11,000 scientists, theologians, philosophers, and other deeply concerned persons trying to offer an alternative to narrow ideologies and the fragmentation that comes from compartmentalizing our lives. We are working to transform education and research in order to better address our common human questions and…
Accentuating the positive: Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield continue the fight against the over-diagnosis of depression-as-disease in their Op-Ed, “Sadness is not a disorder.” They contend: What’s wrong is this: Depressive disorder and normal sadness are different conditions with different prognoses and implications. In responding to intense sadness, psychiatry does a disservice by…
Sometimes at Metanexus we say that we’re after “the whole story of the whole cosmos for the whole person.” We say we’re after it because we do not possess anything like the whole story. We say it, though, because the whole story is more like our motivating hope, our “regulative idea,” so to speak, that…
The Islamist question, in the forefront of European and American thinking, might be put this way: Should support go to “enlightened fundamentalists” or to “Muslim dissidents”? (I have some problems with referring to any believer as “fundamentalist”…) Another way would be to ask, should we promote difference-based “multiculturalism” or resemblance-based “universalism”? Pascal Bruckner unleashed a…
I couldn’t agree more with this assessment by Glenn T. Miller, academic dean and professor of ecclesiastical history at Bangor Theological Seminary, on the decision to split the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature annual meetings. In a piece by Jennifer Howard in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Miller is also…
Slavoj éiûek reminds us that resistance is not futile (in the London Review of Books): The lesson here is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfil. Since they know that we know it, such an ‘infinitely demanding’ attitude presents no problem for those…
From the Center for American Progress, scary stuff. Among my favorites: Say Goodbye to Discoveries of Sharks That Can Walk Say Goodbye to French Fries Say Hello to Bulgarian Hooker Shortages Gender-Bended Lizards Thunderstorms Get Dangerous War in Somalia And my Number One favorite: Burning Poo You’ll just have to read this for yourself….
The education of the whole person requires more than just intellectual development, and service learning and other such programs are attempts to fulfill that aspect of education that brings persons into concernful relations with each other. There was a special report on national service progams at Time.com. But Lewis Buzbee has a corker of an…