June 2010
“How can we choose love when we have experienced so little of it? We choose love...”
– Henri Nouwen
“Mr. Obama and the Democrats have wasted the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity...”
– Bob Herbert
The dangers of financial illiteracy in America →
Halfway through his Presidency, George W. Bush called on the country to build “an ownership society.” He trumpeted the soaring rate of U.S. homeownership, and extolled the virtues of giving individuals more control over their own financial lives. It was a comforting vision, but, as we now know, behind it was a bleak reality—bad subprime loans, mountains of credit-card debt, and shrinking...
“Well, there is a war on journalism. There’s long been a war on journalism....”
– John Pilger
In Ireland, a Picture of the Cost of Austerity →
As Europe’s major economies focus on belt-tightening, they are following the path of Ireland. But the once thriving nation is struggling, with no sign of a rapid turnaround in sight.
Nearly two years ago, an economic collapse forced Ireland to cut public spending and raise taxes, the type of austerity measures that financial markets are now pressing on most advanced industrial nations.
“When...
technipol asked: Follow me? (I've been following you since I first joined and I see the same things on our blogs sometimes)
“Peace theory holds that violent conflict happens when we act on a lie or an...”
– Valerie Elverton Dixon
Achieving Enlightened Competence →
In order to help one analyze at which stage he is at, we must discuss in detail what these progressive stages of development of competence are:
1. Unconscious Incompetence
This is the stage where the human brain is blissfully unaware of what it does not know. At this stage, the human brain does not understand its blind spot or what deficiency it has in particular skill sectors. Since the human...
“Let me just say one thing quickly: I don’t know Michael Hastings....”
– Matt Taibbi
The best vacation ever →
But research looking at how people actually feel about their vacations suggests that, by and large, they remember them warmly — more warmly, in fact, than they feel while taking them. The psychologists Leigh Thompson, of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and Terence Mitchell, of the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, in 1997 reported the results of a...
The Past is No Foreign Country →
Not so with many religious conservatives. The past is much like the present, they must think, with the exception that people in olden times had different hairdos, talked funny, and wore strange clothes. Besides minor changes in wardrobe, hair, and speech, they imagine, the circle is unbroken. The inability to understand change over time is a basic blind spot for a range of evangelical...
“Our thousand fads of diet and drugs predispose us to the belief that we must be...”
– Will Durant
8 Writing Tips from C.S. Lewis →
1. Turn off the radio.
Today, writers also need to turn off the TV, the iPod or the music streaming over the Internet. I know that some writers claim that background sounds enhances their creativity, but I don’t believe it for a minute, and apparently Lewis didn’t either. Writing is a solitary activity, where words are formed in a special space of the brain, and anything that competes for that...
“Media is the connective tissue of society.”
– Clay Shirky
As world watches soccer's Cup, Nike critic sees... →
Keady told the story of one Nike factory worker.
“He said that one day, he’d like to be able to buy a pair of Nike sneakers that he helps make,” the activist recalled. “After 19 years of factory work, he wanted to be able to bring home the product so he could show his daughter what Daddy does. That just floored me.”
“As a nation we began by declaring “all men are created equal.” We now...”
– Abraham Lincoln
“A demagogue cares so much about winning that he’d rather wreck the system...”
– Seth Godin
“The history of theology (Christian or otherwise) is the history of people...”
– Frank Schaeffer
“Over my lifetime, we are going to go from a small number of people having access...”
– Eric Schmidt
Abraham's Ancestors Came Out of Africa →
To construct an accurate picture of the ancient world of Genesis we must examine the assumption that Abraham’s people originated in the Tigris-Euphrates area. The Genesis genealogies presents a different picture: that Abraham’s ancestors migrated east and north from Africa, and the evidence of anthropology, genetics, archaeology and linguistics supports this view. These ancestors are the first...
“When we consider the rights of workers in relation to the “indirect...”
– Karol Jozef Wojtyla
The Age of Peace →
One overlooked benefit of aging populations may be the prospect of a more peaceful world.
Demographers have found that developing nations with “youth bulges”—more than 40 percent of people between the ages of 15 and 29—are 2.5 times more prone to internal conflict, including terrorism, than countries with fewer young people, largely because of high unemployment combined with youthful exuberance...
“Beyond our investments in basic research, I believe a greater focus in two...”
– President Barack Obama
“The peaceful were corralled, the violent impotent. I doubt that G-20 delegates...”
– Dennis Perrin
“One question I pose in The Divine Commodity is this: If brands have become...”
– Skye Jethani
The sting of poverty →
But, according to Karelis, that argument is exactly backward. Reducing the number of economic hardships that the poor have to deal with actually make them more, not less, likely to work, just as repairing most of the dents on a car makes the owner more likely to fix the last couple on his own. Simply giving the poor money with no strings attached, rather than using it, as federal and state...
“As the process of globalization draws us ever closer in networks of...”
– What Derrida Really Meant
“Christians in America seem to be living in a movie where they have written every...”
– Michael Spencer
“What banks and governments have been doing for the past eighteen months is a...”
– James Howard Kunstler
“To contemplate war is to think about the most horrible of human experiences...”
– Robert Byrd
“The US Civil War did not end in 1865. Its unleashed spirit of total destruction...”
– James Carroll
“Trying to use the Bible to prove the church wrong is like trying to use the...”
– 10 Things Your Minister Wants to Tell You: (But Can’t, Because He Needs the Job)
“We dislike education, because it was not presented to us in our youth for what...”
– Will Durant
“As far as rhetoric is concerned, the revival of the old-time religion is most...”
– Paul Krugman
“I believe in Jesus Christ. Nowhere am I requested to believe in any thing, or in...”
– George MacDonald
“When preparing for violent conflict, time, training, and equipment are...”
– John Howard Yoder