Tag: pragmatism
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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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Paint the Other Cheek
When?The Nation?assigned me to do a story about questions of violence and nonviolence at Occupy Wall Street early last month, I had no idea how much the subject would explode. Occupy Oakland’s “Move-In Day” on January 28 and a subsequent article by Chris Hedges (as well as some heated discussions on my articles at Waging…
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The Rich Are Organized—Why Aren’t You?
At a time when, in the United States, majority opinions—like the need for tax increases, military-spending cuts, clean energy, and campaign finance reform—don’t seem to even be on the table in Washington, when?whole neighborhoods and cities seem to have fallen off the political map, one might find oneself wondering:?Where did our democracy go? Today at…
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Papal Peacemaking
When I spoke with the theologian Harvey Cox a few months ago, he told me enthusiastically about his experiences with Sant’Egidio, a lay Catholic organization that he sees as representing the future of the Church and, in turn, of religion in what he calls the coming “age of spirit”: I was over there in Rome…
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Science of the Secular
Extra! Extra! In the Ideas section of today’s Boston Globe, I’ve got a new article. Read all about it! RELIGION CAN BE good for more than the soul, a growing number of studies seem to say. Over the past decade, academic research on religiosity has exploded, and with it has come a raft of publications…
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Taking Our Bombs Too Lightly
As far as I can recall, Jeffrey Stout is the only person who has managed to make me come close to tears at an academic lecture. The occasion was his plenary at the 2007 American Academy of Religion meeting in San Diego, later published in the JAAR as “The Folly of Secularism.” At the time…
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Reasons in Practice
Sunday morning at the AAR (okay, maybe I am live-blogging) I went not to church (unless you count the moment of prayer at the panel on Zizek by the Christian Theological Research Fellowship) but to a comparative ethics panel about John Kelsay’s recent book, Arguing the Just War in Islam. The panelists discussed the book…