Politics
Wafflehouse Victims

We Should Not Be Seeing These Pictures

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Akilah Sasilva, Taurean C. Sanderlin, DeEbony Groves, and Joe R. Perez. These young people
should be going about their lives in relative anonymity, attending
school, working, and dreaming. And unless one of these individuals is a
friend or a loved one, you should not be seeing these images. But here we are again. Innocent people gunned down at a Waffle House in Nashville, Tennessee, and we’re viewing people’s images we would not have seen otherwise.

Uncategorized

Salvation for an Atheist

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A tearful little boy approached Pope Francis
last week with a question about his atheist dad who had recently died. Traditional Christian doctrine teaches that belief in God through Jesus
is essential to life after death. But Pope Francis spoke a more personal
truth about God to this distraught child, who was escorted up to the
Pope after he could not speak his question into a microphone. “Is Dad in heaven?” the boy asked the Pope, whispering in his ear.

Politics

Who Has It the Roughest?

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Toni Morrison wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye, at age 39. For
a long time she had wanted to read a book about “the most vulnerable
person in society…and it wasn’t around, so I started writing it,” she
told Hilton Als in a 2014 interview. Ms. Morrison’s most vulnerable person: female, child, black. I live in the opposite end of that vulnerability spectrum: male, middle-aged, white. I have been broke and unemployed, but I’ve never experienced the abject vulnerability of a little girl in South Sudan.

Articles

Haidt Stories

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The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion is Jonathan Haidt’s study of how and why people along a spectrum from extreme liberal to extreme conservative viewpoints coalesce around certain value systems. To get us going, on the first page he presents these two hypothetical tales:

I’m going to tell you a brief story. Pause after you read it and decide whether the people in the story did anything morally wrong.A family’s dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They had heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body and cooked it and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this.If you are like most of the well-educated people in my studies, you felt an initial flash of disgust, but you hesitated before saying the family had done anything morally wrong. After all, the dog was dead already, so they didn’t hurt it, right?