Reading Time: 6 minutes First Amendment-loving conservatives have long blamed isolated mental-health issues in very angry individuals but never the availability of guns as the proximate cause of America’s decades-long epidemic of horrific mass shootings in America. Or they claim mass shootings are hardly a problem at all and that, by the way, overall gun violence is supposedly down […]
Racial justice
Posted inReligion
Fascism in India: The weaponization of religious custom
Reading Time: 8 minutes Where I live, Navidad and Semana Santa are significant religious affairs, times when the hustle and bustle of city life eases for a month and a week respectively: to observe Catholic customs, to be with family, or simply to travel to nearby towns and farms. One side effect, though, is the impact of reduced foot […]
Posted inPolitics
Fascism in India: The global turn toward nationalist politics
Reading Time: 9 minutes Although I never needed to “deconvert” from a religious tradition, I was fascinated by New Atheism’s debate circuits at the turn of the century: The eloquence of its speeches. All those witty rejoinders. The rallying of knowledge from a range of disciplines to out-fact an opponent. It was easy to fall prey to the idea […]
Posted inRacial justice
Christian school promises ‘swift action’ after racist video goes viral
Reading Time: 3 minutes On Tuesday night, a racist video began making the rounds on Twitter, allegedly featuring members of the baseball team from Grace Christian Academy in Knoxville, Tennessee. It showed a student wearing a KKK hood, sitting on a chair with the “Grace” logo on it. Off-camera, someone shouts, “Who do we hate?” The boy in the […]
Posted inRacial justice
Grove City College’s anti-‘woke’ report contradicts its stated Christian values
Reading Time: 14 minutes Grove City College is your typical conservative Christian college, but I’m not your typical alumna. Unlike my fellow students, I’m an atheist, and I formed this identity inside Grove City’s faith-based Pennsylvania bubble. Since graduating in May of 2018, I’ve done my best to distance myself from the school, breaking my silence only when the […]
Posted inHistory
Fascism in India: The role of Nazis in Hindu nationalism
Reading Time: 7 minutes When writing on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s role in Hindu extremism, I committed the cardinal sin of not defining a key term: fascism. This was a conscious choice, because I’ve written before on how quickly we mire ourselves in political word games. Better to start with the government figure that Western media keeps centering, as […]
Posted inHistory
Fascism in India: Who’s ‘in charge’ of 1.4 billion?
Reading Time: 8 minutes There’s something fascinating, if also disturbing, about Western incuriosity around the world’s largest democracy. 1.4 billion of our world’s 7.8 live in India, a country a third the size of the US, which has under a quarter of India’s population. How can the fortunes of so many mean so little? Nevertheless, India exists in the […]
Posted inWar and Peace
Beyond Ukraine: The global response to (un)civil wars
Reading Time: 6 minutes With Western attention on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it’s easy to forget the added pain of people from regions where crimes against humanity have been raging all this time. But it’s a whole different level of heartbreak for many to witness European borders suddenly opening wide, stronger sanctions put in place, and international organizations rallying […]
Posted inNews
New lawsuit alleges South Dakota hotel banned Native Americans
Reading Time: 2 minutes America has a long, ugly history of discrimination and racism. For most of that history, skin color and ethnicity determined how much political and economic access you had. This adversely impacted the standard of living for nonwhite groups, who had less access to capital, education, and resources. After the Civil Rights Movement, broad changes in […]
Posted inCritical thinking
7 tips for arguing with a chance of changing someone’s mind
Reading Time: 5 minutes Daryl Davis is a Black man fascinated by hate groups. In researching the KKK, he sought out members and met with them. Here’s what he learned.