Katrina Lantos Swett contributes a post for On Faith’s Guest Voices: Across the globe, religion and belief continue to matter deeply in the lives of people and their cultures. From worship to prayer, births to funerals, weddings to holy days, almsgiving to thanksgiving, religion is a central source of identity, meaning, and purpose for billions…
From Michaela Pommells at Huffington Post: Let’s face it, race inequity may not be a deliberate goal of education policy and practice (or maybe it is) but neither is it accidental. The result is a whole lot of seemingly well-meaning people trying to evoke change in an education system that never intended to educate people…
Climate change is already contributing to the deaths of nearly 400,000 people a year and costing the world more than $1.2 trillion, wiping 1.6% annually from global GDP, according to a new study. The impacts are being felt most keenly in developing countries, according to the research, where damage to agricultural production from extreme weather…
When His Holiness the Dalai Lama (HHDL) posted on Facebook recently that “religion is no longer adequate,” every journalist with a religious beat was up in arms over his words. What did this mean for the millions of practicing Buddhists, not to mention for his millions of spiritually-curious online followers? But his atheistic-toned words should…
A toddler’s “slave footprint” – how much forced labor in the global human trafficking economy is used to produce all her “stuff” – can be calculated on a new human trafficking website. And the results can surprise parents. It turns out that many of the toys and baby products that fill American family homes are…
Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO), his party’s candidate in the Missouri Senate race to unseat Democrat Claire McCaskill, has quickly attempted to retract his comment that in cases of “legitimate rape,” women have biological defenses against pregnancy. “I misspoke,” he claimed in a carefully crafted statement. After all, cleaning up the mess after the candidate not…
Over at Edge.org, Harvard University physician and social scientist Nicholas A. Christakis discusses transformative changes in the social sciences in the 21st Century: These three things—a biological hurricane, computational social science, and the rediscovery of experimentation—are going to change the social sciences in the 21st century. With that change will come, in my judgment, a…
The supply of children in U.S. foster care far exceeds the demand for their adoption. Indeed, only one in five children is adopted from foster care in the United States. Not only do the circumstances leading to the surrender of children to the state continue unabated (negligence, abuse, poverty, drug addiction of the parents), but…
A new federal court ruling represents an ominous legal trend: Religious freedom is morphing into religious power
Innovation researcher Maria Clara Couto Soares calls for a new debate on expanding the reach of grassroots social innovations.