Reading Time: 4 minutes The party leaders are ancient. They’ve been in charge of the White House and Congress for almost two years but haven’t delivered. They bring butter knives to political fights with a rival party that wields AR-15s. So it seems from the vantage point of many young progressive citizens, and it’s more than understandable that they’re […]
Tom Krattenmaker
Tom Krattenmaker is a writer specializing in religion, meaning, and values in public life. A longtime columnist for USA Today, he is the author of three award-winning books, including "Confessions of a Secular Jesus Follower," and a former Board member of the Yale Humanist Community.
Posted inFilm/TV
Exploring the lost art of dying
Reading Time: 5 minutes Given its centrality to the human experience—it happens to everyone, no exceptions—you’d think our culture would engage the subject more. But it’s remained largely taboo. Try to start a conversation about it, your friend or family member might accuse of you being “morbid.” Reveal that you’ve been thinking about it lately, your spouse might push […]
Posted inCulture
It’s times like these when hope is hardest to find—and when it’s needed most
Reading Time: 6 minutes To be progressive and politically engaged this summer is to absorb one blow after another, with more in the offing. The demise of Roe v. Wade. Severe limits slapped onto the EPA’s ability to combat climate change through regulation of power-plant carbon emissions. The specter of Republican-dominated state legislatures being turned loose to administer federal […]
Posted inCulture
Let’s take vacation seriously—by actually taking it
Reading Time: 3 minutes We need it. We deserve it. But research shows we usually don’t take all that we have coming to us. And if we do there’s a good chance we spend much of it responding to work messages, ruminating over office problems, and experiencing all the attendant stress. As summer sets in—prime season for getting away […]
Posted inArt
Toppling Confederate monuments is only half the job. What replaces them?
Reading Time: 3 minutes Citizens in Charlottesville, Virginia, are giving input on what kind of public art ought to be created at a park where a massive statue once stood. Not just any statue. The monument glorifying Robert E. Lee. Not just any park, but the site of the infamous “Unite the Right” rally of white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and “alt-right” denizens […]
Posted inClimate Crisis
When there’s nothing left to burn
Reading Time: 3 minutes Wynn Alan Bruce reached the point where he felt he had nothing left to burn. So he set himself on fire. Since learning of this man’s self-immolation on Earth Day, I can’t shake the mental picture of him sitting in front of the U.S. Supreme Court building, dying in unimaginable pain, his flesh consumed by […]
Posted inPolitics
Supreme Court: The real game behind the coach and his post-game prayers
Reading Time: 6 minutes I affirm the right of my religious fellow citizens to pray. I can even see the good in it. But as the consumer of too many tales of aggressive assertions of Christianity in sports, I could not help but be cynical when I heard about the unassuming public-school football coach who had to lawyer up […]
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
Religion as the sole path to happiness? Not on your one and only life
Reading Time: 3 minutes A renewed line of pro-religion persuasion is leveraging people’s desire for happiness and religion’s purported ability to provide it. I suspect that with seculars it’s proving as effective as the many get-religion rhetorical gambits that have gone before it. Which is to say not effective. At all. A recent piece at the Big Think portal […]
Posted inGeneral
With Ukraine on fire, no more time for charlatans and fools in this country
Reading Time: 3 minutes The nonsense in American political culture is more clearly revealed as corrupt and absurd, such as the hyperbolic reactions against “tyrannical” mask mandates and the like during a pandemic. You want to know what tyranny is? Ask the Ukrainians who are facing the very real prospect of Putin taking over their country.
Posted inPolitics
Putin isn’t ‘strong.’ Neither is his fanboy Trump
Reading Time: 3 minutes Putin has gone from riding horses in southern Siberia to riding tanks and bombers into Ukraine. Trump has gone from testy exchanges with Marco Rubio over penis size—from getting Marla Maples to testify to his supposedly awesome sexual prowess—to undermining the very foundations of America’s law and democracy.