One of the true crazies of the religious Right in this country is the Reverend Fred Phelps, bona fide hatemonger and pastor of the Westboro (Kansas) Baptist Church. He’s the man who claimed that 9/11 was God’s payback to America for its tolerance of feminists and homosexuals, as was Hurricane Katrina, and he regularly drags…
Read MoreAccording to President Obama, I was solidly within the majority American opinion last Monday when I breathed a sigh of relief upon hearing his decision to lift the ban on federal funding for stem-cell research using destroyed human embryos. In his trademark careful and conscientious rhetoric, Obama acknowledged the deep moral difficulties this issue poses,…
Read MoreThere’s quite a bit of chatter going on in the American Philosophical Association right now concerning that organization’s antidiscrimination policy– more specifically, it’s policy forbidding institutions from discriminating against homosexuals in hiring. Professor Charles Hermes (University of Texas- Arlington) authored a petition, which now has over 1300 signatures, calling for the APA to either (1)…
Read MoreThere is an old, well-worn and tired stereotype of academics that figures them/us as people who restrict their/our lives to the Ivory Tower, engaged in intellectual pursuits and disengaged from the practical concerns of everyday life. (Incidentally, the “tower” pictured to the left really is one of the towers on my campus.) I suppose that…
Read More[If you’re wondering where the first two parts of the “mourning” series are, see The Work of Mourning (November ’06) and Mourning Again (November ’07)] As you may or may not remember, then-President George H.W. Bush banned images of American coffins (and dead) in 1991, against protests that the ban was an attempt to cover…
Read MoreOver at Slate, Timothy Noah has begun an 8-part series called Why No More 9/11s?, in an attempt to answer the question that has probably stymied all of us at some point in the last eight years. Immediately following the September 11th attacks, most counterterrorism experts and others in the know predicted that it was…
Read MoreLast night, I posted the transcript and some video clips of Obama’s 2009 State of the Union Address. Here are my thoughts on the speech: The Tone:Perfect. We all expected that President Hope would sound strong and inspiring last night, that he would steer clear of fear and pessimism, that he would rally the troops……
Read MoreIt’s not often that I post on something about which I have genuine ambivalence, but here’s one: medical records. Last week, President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), one of the goals of which is to encourage the adoption of electronic medical records by doctors and hospitals. At present, medical…
Read MoreLast night at the 51st Grammy Awards, the Recording Academy President Neil Portnow extended a long-overdue appeal to President Obama when he said: “Our finest national treasure is our culture in the arts, so it’s time that we acknowledged that fact with the creation of the Cabinet position of Secretary of the Arts.” How right…
Read MorePerhaps one of the most ethically challenging, and truly heartwrenching, figures of contemporary (by which I mean, post-WWII) philosophy is that of the Muselmann. The word Muselmann literally means “Muslim” (“one who submits to God”), but is used to refer to prisoners of Nazi concentration camps who had become so destitute and dehumanized as to…
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