In this age of short attention spans, virtual facts, and lowered denominators, let me ask: when is it important to exaggerate, lie, and cynically promise the moon when you know that leveling with people is a loser? Do good ideas need to be lied about or surrounded with misleading, unfinished, and incomplete truths just to…
Studying Religion and Acting Politically:How We Decide to be HumanIn the study of religion we consider how people’s beliefs, values, and actions inform our human responses to nature, culture, and individual conscience. As professionals we must consider our subject the way a myrmcologist takes up ants, that is, we study our subject first in an…
The Accusation of “Intolerance”A Few Words for Your Cultured Despisers How “tolerant” are we called to be in debate and conversation with those who would side with moral turpitude and relativism? I think we who resist Trump will be accused of such “intolerance” as we contend with the casuistry and deception that fuels their “both…
The Bothersome Assignment of Being AmericanA School Teacher’s Lesson Plan It’s nearly the school year and I’m a school teacher. This role confers a few prerogatives, like restating the obvious, discomforting certainties, and demanding a certain respect for the shared enterprise. It’s always hard not to be pedantic because America, for all of its storied…
Monuments to Failure and Hope’s Unfinished FutureWhat Do We Do Now?“We cannot pretend that the ugly bigotry unleashed in the streets of Charlottesville, Va., this weekend has nothing to do with the election of Donald Trump….Now is the time for every decent white American to prove he or she loves this country by actively speaking…
The Trump Lemonade StandNo Picture Yet So Here’s a Thousand Words Canandaigua is one of the beautiful lake towns of New York’s Finger Lakes, one quite close to our own outpost in the nearby hills. Lake properties are expensive, some posh enough to demand real money. The summer season is short, of course, and the…
Republicans will now “move on” to “tax reform.” This means an enormous, unaffordable, unnecessary tax cut for the wealthiest few and corporate welfare beyond any imagining. We, the resisting will resist, point out the facts and try ever so earnestly to convince the populace that this is not in their interests. Evidence, arguments, facts brought…
Have any of you slogged through the monumental biography of Lincoln by Michael Burlingame? I’m twice through now though I confess that you could only love this kind of forensic historical detail if you love something as tedious, fatiguingly insular, and bromidic as, say, Indo-European linguistics or Indian philosophy. There’s a lot to learn but…
Why, why would I do this? I hear you all the way from wherever you are. And I am very likely very far away from your there, deep as I am in the depths of the Trump Ocean. Only somewhere in Arkansas or Oklahoma is there a Congressional district as regressive and abaft the beam…
We’d have to poke into conversations and polls to make the point of today’s sermon stick. But the issue I raise here might be more than correlation— it might be causality. That is IF you are inclined to a faith-based worldview— especially one that adds in race and nationalism— THEN you are more likely to…