Reading Time: 6 minutes It might surprise some readers here, considering the proactive tone of many of my posts on OnlySky, but I spent the last two years living with deep, pragmatic skepticism about the long-term viability of this project. While I had hoped this day would never come, I wasn’t shocked when it did. You won’t have seen […]
humanism
Posted inCulture
When it’s all too much: How to endure a polycrisis
Reading Time: 6 minutes Amid many concurrent global crises, it’s easy to forget what we can address. But surviving a polycrisis is and always has been a much more everyday affair.
Posted inWar and Peace
Ethnoreligious war and the struggle for a global secular commons
Reading Time: 7 minutes Much as we might like to think that there exists a global secular commons, a consensus-driven international terrain wherein different cultures might agree to rise above respective nationalist ambitions, the current world landscape only affirms how routinely broken is the promise of international governance.
Posted inCulture
Fighting desensitization in a world of war and disaster
Reading Time: 9 minutes On February 6, 2023, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit southeastern Turkey, near its border with Syria. Around nine hours later, a 7.5-magnitude earthquake struck, and hundreds of aftershocks reverberated in the vicinity. The impact area, of around 42,471 miles, was equivalent to the size of Bulgaria and involved the destruction of over 230,000 buildings, with tens […]
Posted inCrime and Punishment
Breaking bread: Houston tries to punish feeding the homeless—and fails
Reading Time: 5 minutes In a story that recalls the ancient custom of sacred hospitality, the city of Houston is trying to punish a charity for feeding the homeless—but they can’t find a jury willing to go along with it.
Posted inCritical thinking
How the fight for evolution prepared us to fight for democracy
Reading Time: 8 minutes Problems with scientific and political literacy aren’t so different. Bad faith actors in both realms use our shorthand against us, whether for evolution or democracy. The solution is learning to target the material realities underpinning our language instead.
Posted inWar and Peace
The weaponization of crimes against women
Reading Time: 10 minutes During the early waves of the COVID pandemic, Ethiopia and Tigray were embroiled in a brutal civil war. The mass rape, torture, and murder of women and girls happened then, and continues to happen now, well after a “peace” was reached in 2022. In 2022, soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, gruesome accounts of women gang-raped […]
Posted inPhilosophy
The myth of personhood on a wartorn Christmas morn
Reading Time: 9 minutes Bethlehem is a city in mourning this year: quiet, with its usual tourist venues shuttered for weeks on account of the war in Gaza, and with very little of the joy that Christians usually associate with the season. As the mythology goes in Luke 2, an angel descended after the birth of Jesus Christ, and […]
Posted inHistory
Data support universal basic income. When will that translate into better policy?
Reading Time: 13 minutes We have a wealth of data that dismisses tired, racialized stereotypes about welfare recipients. What will it take to translate Universal Basic Income research into policy?
Posted inNonreligious News
UK Ministry of Defence to recruit nonreligious chaplains
Reading Time: 3 minutes When he joined the Royal Navy, a friend of mine was asked his religion. When he answered that he was nonreligious, he received the reply, “Well in that case, we’ll put you down as Free Church.” There was no existing way to accommodate such a category at the time. The Armed Forces are generally associated […]