Tag: ethics
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Ours to Hack
The Internet we’ve been waiting for is now available for pre-order—or, at least, a book about it. For the past couple of years, New School professor Trebor Scholz and I have been working the support and build a movement to develop more democratic, fair, and accountable ownership models for the online economy. We organized a…
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The Scandal of White Complicity
In the national Catholic magazine America I’ve just published a short review of an important new book with a long title: The Scandal of White Complicity in U.S. Hyper-Incarceration: A White Spirituality of Resistance. It’s an effort by three Catholic thinkers to articulate the depth of white complicity in this country’s massive, highly racialized prison…
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Hacking the World
My profile of anthropologist Gabriella Coleman in The Chronicle of Higher Education opens with a scene from the New York City memorial service for Aaron Swartz in January: The forces that seem to have hastened Swartz’s death were very much haunting the room. In the audience was a mischievous, greasy-haired hacker known as “weev,” who…
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How to Instigate a God Debate
Last week I had the chance to catch what was probably the biggest God debate of the year, in this genre of blockbuster, YouTubed, college-campus bouts. The topic was “Is Good from God?”—is religion necessary for objective morality? The debaters were William Lane Craig, the evangelical philosopher, and Sam Harris, who launched the New Atheism…
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Gene Sharp and the Science of People Power
It’s a happy day when good ideas—and the people who create them—get their due. Today was one of those days. Thanks in large part to The New York Times’s feature on the backdrop of the revolution in Egypt, and then a profile devoted to him (which as I write is still #1 on the most-emailed…
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Apolitical Heresies
Yesterday the folks over at The Guardian’s Belief section asked me to weigh in on their question of the week, and for better or worse I sacrificed most of the day’s opportunity for book-writing on the altar of Welcome Distraction. The question is: “Can religion be apolitical?” What they have in mind, being British and…
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The Significance of Borders
In an attempt to tame the back-and-forth we had on Bloggingheads recently, religious and philosophical ethicist Richard Amesbury and I have a text interview today at The Immanent Frame, which covers a similarly broad range of themes: human rights, the definition of religion, and New Atheism. NS: Is there something that, above all, ties together…
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Judith Butler’s Carefully Crafted F**k You
In the current issue of the wonderful online magazine Guernica, I’ve got an interview with none other than the critical theorist Judith Butler. Her latest book, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), reflects on the past decade’s saga of needless war, photographed—even fetishized—torture, and routine horror. It treats these practices as issuing from…
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Life After Past Evil
In the last several decades, there have been numerous—and largely unprecedented—efforts around the world to develop and enact protocols for what to do in the wake of conflict and horror. From Nuremberg, to South Africa, to Guatemala, different models have been tried, and each bears lessons for the future. At The Immanent Frame today, I…