Category: Culture
“What would it be like to surrender?”
This story by Jonathan Parks-Ramage about his encounter with an evangelical church in LA is moving and beautiful: Treat presents a ready-made identity, perfect for those who feel lost. In the months leading up to this service, I spoke with...
when the plant closes
Alec MacGillis has been doing stellar work about some of America’s neglected places, and this piece about a town in Ohio grappling with the imminent closure of a coal-fired power plant is no different: Lee Anderson, director of governmental affairs...
“we don’t speak a language, we speak normal!”
Our family lived down the road from Shelvis and Nancy Smith-Mather when I worked in South Sudan, and we were enormously blessed to be their neighbors and friends. They, like us, have had to relocate and are now doing peacebuilding...
sex robots: not just about sex anymore… or ever!
Everyone loves a good read about the history of sex robots, right? “Sex robots,” therefore, have always been about more than sex. They’ve been a cultural repository for wider uncertainties in times of social change: a literalization of the fear...
it’s all about governance and trust
Shadi Hamid, Vanda Felbab-Brown, and Harold Trinkunas share an excerpt from their new book on governance and trust, a subject that I’ve been banging on about for quite a while now: The Taliban claims to adhere to a strict interpretation of...
the history of capitalism and the glory of man
Note: I am sorry for the inconsistent posting schedule. Our family moved two weeks ago to our new field of service and the internet here is so inconsistent that I have been unable to connect every time that I sat...
the problem with values
Charlie Clark (one of the Fare Forward founders) has published a speech he gave recently at Dartmouth, and I empathize quite a bit with these lines about “values” in regards to medical education: I don’t know about you, but my...
“For G-d So Loved Haiti”
There is so much here in this long essay about the controversial Pentecostal preachers of Haiti and the traditional Vodou practices: I asked [the pastor] whether he had founded Shalom to combat Vodou in the country, and he shook his...
spend time with poor people, be friends and neighbors
I love it when Eve Tushnet gets on her soapbox about poverty and virtue, and this great piece about the much-touted “success sequence” is no exception: The people I speak with believe they have a responsibility—there’s that word again—to achieve...
learning the tools that let you make your own tools
Alan Jacobs doesn’t want kids to learn to code. But he does think they should learn to build their own websites: To teach children how to own their own domains and make their own websites might seem a small thing....