When Shrugging is Not an Option
- May/June 2025
- April 30, 2025
Given the severe anticipated health risks of COVID-19, it should not have been a surprise when state and local governments began to impose significant restrictions. Millions of Americans were placed under orders to stay at home and avoid “nonessential” work and activities. The economy reacted immediately, with unemployment rates equaling or exceeding those occurring during
READ MOREIt is becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile this year of COVID-19 with anything but a bad dream. As the contagion moved from Wuhan, China, to parts Occidental, the lights began to go out. Even before the body count was beyond annual influenza proportions the unwinding of civilization had begun. Now U.S. deaths alone are well
READ MOREIn every election from 1952 to 1968, though few Americans know it, a Pentecostal preacher ran for president of the United States. This clergyman, as Theocratic Party candidate for the nation’s highest office, promised to unite church and state, base the nation’s laws on the King James Bible, appoint leading churchmen to all Cabinet offices,
READ MOREReligion has become inherently political in 2020. For decades capital punishment, same-sex marriage, and gun control have been hot-button topics on the campaign trail. But now presidential candidates are expected to address late-term abortion, transgender rights, and Sharia law during their debates. These issues, and the legislature that will result depending on which candidate is
READ MOREIn the film Reds, Warren Beatty’s biopic of the radical journalist and, for a time, Lenin sympathizer John Reed, we first see Reed chasing a runaway horse-drawn vehicle during his time with the revolutionary Pancho Villa. At the end of the film this image emerges once again, where Reed, disillusioned by the Bolshevik Revolution, once
READ MOREOn June 16, 2019, the Quebec National Assembly adopted Bill 21, allegedly to promote the religious neutrality of the state. In reality it impinges on religious minority rights by limiting what members of minorities can wear in certain kinds of employment.The law forbids the wearing of religious symbols by teachers, police, judges, and correctional officers
READ MOREThe Nones–the religiously unaffiliated–represent a compromise between being an atheist or agnostic, and holding on to pure faith and traditional organized religion. The Nones are independent in their thinking, spiritual but not dogmatic, and they challenge organized religion on such issues as abortion, euthanasia, separation of church and state, women’s right to join the priesthood,
READ MOREFrank Schaeffer is the son of Francis and Edith Schaeffer, who founded the L’Abri community in Switzerland in 1955. L’Abri was a hippie, Evangelical commune through which many a young seeker passed and where young Frank was raised according to what he calls the doctrine of fundamentalist Christianity. Dad was an evangelical Christian theologian, philosopher,
READ MORELast time I was in Venice the water stains in St. Mark’s Square were still visible, though months after the last flooding tide. Some of the steps onto the canal looked suspiciously slimy, but by and large it was easy to forget the predicted Atlantean future. The most unavoidable reminder was one grand and ancient
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