• Politics/Culture

    Running From Fear: Islamic Jihad and the Purported Doom of America

    December 17, 2015 - By 

    Watching the entirety of the Republican presidential debate Wednesday night and then reading the transcript the next morning, I felt compelled to check my passport and a calendar to make sure I’m not living in Poland in 1939, right after Hitler’s armies moved in with their tanks, robbing us of our sovereignty and destroying our way of life. To hear the candidates tell it, we have never lived in more perilous times, nor has our country ever been in as sad-sack shape as we are now under the craven and cowardly leadership of President Obama. Ben Carson: “We need to…

  • Politics/Culture - Religion

    The Problem of ISIS and Religious Fanaticism

    September 13, 2014 - By 

    Demilitarization would be nice, of course. Blow up all those munitions in far-flung deserts, toss the rifles into the sea, put the B-52s and Hornets and Raptors on display at the military museums, noting them all as relics of the bygone, violent infancy of human history. But on the way to that rather starry-eyed but ultimately necessary development, it may be even more important that we engage in a process of deliteralization. Meaning that we learn to take all sacred texts and their often contradictory guidelines for human behavior with the proverbial grains of salt they require if we are…