Reading Time: 3 minutes Step One: Remove all other plans from your calendar. It’s hard to tell if a line will take twenty minutes or twenty hours. You live for this intoxicating mystery. Make sure you have ample time and nowhere else to be. Whether waiting for the butcher or for some sick Toby Keith tickets, leave a wide […]
united states
Posted inCulture
Are we talking about the same America?
Reading Time: 4 minutes When I hear, “Donald Trump doesn’t represent the America I know,” it makes me wonder what America they’re speaking of.
Posted inPolitics
Disinviting bigoted campus speakers blocks bigotry not free speech
Reading Time: 6 minutes When American university and college students try to deny “free speech” platforms to arch-conservative opinion leaders they consider dangerous purveyors of bigotry, or just shout them down, right-wing complaints of suppression are swift and virulent. The constant trope is that American higher education institutions are controlled by “woke,” “liberal” academics and students who want to […]
Posted inReproductive rights
The Catholic Justices driving the Supreme Court’s Roe reversal
Reading Time: 5 minutes I grew up Catholic, so I know something about the ancient faith’s hammerlock absolutism, especially regarding anything even remotely sexual. That’s why I immediately thought of sexuality when I learned along with everyone else this week about the “leaked draft opinion” of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. in a case that threatens […]
Posted inReligion
Will American religion one day mirror Norwegian godlessness? We should be so lucky
Reading Time: 4 minutes Norwegian godlessness today just might resemble American religion tomorrow. I was thinking this as I read an essay in TheHumanist.com decrying America’s nouveau-traditional National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 3 featuring President Joe Biden’s keynote call for unity. The United States, with its quasi-sacred religious freedom and church-state-separation ethos, does not have an officially designated national […]
Posted inPolitics, Religion
Saudi state executes apostates. Is U.S. immune to such religious brutality?
Reading Time: 6 minutes I can confirm firsthand from past decades I spent living and working in Saudi Arabia that the desert kingdom’s citizens are—as most Americans are—generally warm, generous, and kindly folks. Extraordinarily so, in fact. But the Saudi government and presumably most citizens also vigorously support the death penalty. Saudis are the Semitic Muslim, political equivalent of […]
Posted inPolitics
Why do we keep blaming the poor for their poverty?
Reading Time: 7 minutes Is poverty’s root cause more nurture than nature?
Posted inWar and Peace
Why are we so timid in defending Ukraine? It’s MAD.
Reading Time: 5 minutes MAD is the excellent reason why American President Joe Biden—along with the rest of the West—is so seemingly over-cautious in trying to defend Ukraine against the brutal Russian invasion now in progress. MAD is the canny acronym for Mutually Assured Destruction, which, in brief, means first to strike, last to die. In other words, few […]
Posted inReligion
New research says: Most Americans love God but ignore his impotence
Reading Time: 4 minutes (Writer’s note: If you’d like to receive emailed links to each of my columns when posted, please sign up here.) A recent Pew Research Center survey on U.S. attitudes toward the so-called “problem of evil” (and implied divine impotence) brightly underscores how the perpetuating power of religious indoctrination continues into the 21st century to corrupt […]
Posted inCulture
Why the hell don’t we have a mask mandate?
Reading Time: 3 minutes I go to the grocery store. Some patrons are masked, some are not. Some employees are masked, some are not. Welcome to America, I guess, where any public activity is done at your own risk, and where ableist views continue to rule. I go to teach my college classes. Everyone is masked, hurray! This is […]