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South Africa has the world’s second largest AIDS epidemic (in gross numbers). Its neighbor, Zimbabwe, ranks first. During the past ten years, while AIDS has come under control in central African countries with far fewer resources, the disease has gone out of control in South Africa, in the richest, most cosmopolitan nation in the whole …
Continue reading “AIDS in South Africa: Why the Churches Matter”
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For Albert Borgmann, philosophy is a way of taking up the questions that reside at the center of everyday life — questions that are urgent but often inarticulate. The philosophy of technology, which has been the principal focus of his work since the mid-1970s, is about bringing to light and calling into question the technological …
Continue reading “Albert Borgmann on Taming Technology: An Interview”
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Book Review: Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep. By J. Allan Hobson. Oxford University Press, 192 pp. The Paradox of Sleep: The Story of Dreaming. By Michel Jouvet. MIT Press, 227 pp. Not long ago I had a conversation with a Roman Catholic bishop who is an excellent administrator, a thoughtful …
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The only thing that we done wrong Stayed in the Wilderness a day too long! Keep your eyes on the prize . . . There are some of us whose whole adult life, since the early ‘60s or even before, has been devoted to the struggle for racial justice. It may have become our profession …
Continue reading “Beyond Liberation: An Agenda for Educational Justice”
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The moment baseball executive Al Campanis said the unsayable on network television, a small crack appeared in the carefully constructed shell of tolerance that prevails in this country. What Campanis, 70, did was to tell Ted Koppel on ABC’s Nightline that few blacks hold managerial positions in baseball because "I truly believe that they may …
Book Chapter
Action is the key to maintaining life and humanity. By action, Arendt means a a group process, involving many men, a process which is the beginning of something new, the answer to futility, which results in the establishment or re-establishment of the public good.
Book Chapter
To answer social questions is not to answer political questions. To end human poverty and privation and organize an effective flow of goods and services is a major challenge, a must, but it is not the same as establishing freedom. The revolution that establishes the opportunity and structures for freedom fulfills its reason for being.
Book Chapter
Totalitarianism (organized loneliness) threatens to ravage the world as we know it, even before a new beginning has had time to assert itself. Arendt’s faith is in the capacity of man yet to make that new beginning — to act, a capacity guaranteed by each new birth.
Book Chapter
We have action, freedom, rebellion, civil liberties flowing in our national veins. We also have racism, imperialism, vigilanteeism, and violence. The question is, which heritage will prevail in the decade ahead?
Article
When Sister Raphaela Handler arrived in Namibia in 1996 to coordinate the country’s Roman Catholic hospitals and health-care clinics, she realized that AIDS was a "time bomb" about to burst. She had worked previously in Tanzania, and had seen the AIDS pandemic spread there. Although Namibia was years behind Tanzania in the spread of this …
Continue reading “Compassionate Conspiracy: AIDS Action in Namibia”
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On a Saturday afternoon in a betting parlor in Reno, Nevada, Jack, a young mid-westerner, sips his second beer and rolls the cool bottle across his forehead. Cigarette dangling between his fingers, he peers eagerly at the flitting figures on the television screen. UCLA and USC are playing football to determine which team will represent …
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Paradise was very nice for Adam and his madam, until they filched the fruit and took the fall. They lost their place and fell from grace and you can bet we can’t forget that eating is the oldest sin of all. — Victor Buono, Heavy For as long as I can remember, I have been …
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I am a pious apostate, an atheist shocked by the faithlessness of the believers, a fellow traveler of moderate Catholicism who has been out of the church for 20 years. [Michael Harrington]. A conversation with democratic socialist Michael Harrington is like an encounter with an atheist Karl Rahner. Harrington was nurtured in pre-Vatican II Roman …
Continue reading “Conversation with an Atheist — Michael Harrington on Religion and Socialism”
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Last year over 200 people lost their lives as they tried to cross the border from Mexico into Arizona. They died from dehydration in the 120-degree heat of the Sonoran Desert. They died in storm drains as they tried to cross during the flash-flood season. They died in the trunks of vehicles that were abandoned …
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Book Reviews: Aging Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life from the Landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development, by George E. Vaillant. Little, Brown, 384 pp., $14.95 paperback. My Time: Making tile Most of the Bonus Decades After 50, by Abigail Trafford. Basic Books, 273 pp., $14.00 paperback. Growing Old in Christ, edited by Stanley …
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Book Review: Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. By Marion Nestle. University of California Press, 374 pp. Food kills. Though you can drive safely while eating a hamburger, and nobody has proven that donuts are addictive, the fast food culture is as dangerous as an underage driver with a six-pack or …
Book
(ENTIRE BOOK) The author summarizes the thoughts of Hannah Arendt, then uses them as a framework to ask whether America is slipping into a new kind of totalitarianism.
Article
It seemed an endless wait between the test and the medical report. Weeks crept by before David knew if he had tested positive for AIDS antibodies. A dark cloud hung over him. By 1985 hemophiliacs across the U.S. — including David — wanted to know if they had been exposed to the deadly disease. As …
Continue reading “Hemophiliacs and AIDS: Contracting a Killer”
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As most everyone has heard, immigration is profoundly changing the contours of religion in America. Hundreds of thousands of people, most of them from what used to be known as the Third World (relatively few from Europe), stream into the country every year, bringing their religious identities with them. The number of immigrants who have …
Book Chapter
Hanna Arendt celebrates revolution as perhaps the grandest example of human action, and then she points out where it invariably goes wrong. By a combination of ideology and terror, elitist governments set out systematically to destroy a citizenry’s capacity for action.
Article
When I was a kid, in the early 1960s, my friends and I took a great deal of interest in presidential election campaigns. We regarded them as something like a third pennant race, overlapping as they did with the baseball season. We picked favorites, exchanged preferences, made wagers and attempted to root our candidate home …
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Amid the furor periodically aroused by B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism, scant attention has been given to the intriguing relationship between his ideas and Christianity. The shortcomings of Skinner’s theory — that human acts are the product of heredity and environment — are well known; I shall return to one of them later. At the same …
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Blood Rituals: Consequences of Slavery in Two American Centuries By Orlando Patterson. (Civitas/Counterpoint, 330 pp.) The title of Orlando Patterson’s book refers most immediately to the racially motivated lynchings in the old South, which he discusses the second of the three interlocking essays that make up the text. But it also may speak sharply to …
Continue reading “Men Without Women: An African-American Crisis”
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In 1970, when Timothy Tyson was ten years old, a black man named Henry “Dickie” Marrow was murdered in Oxford, North Carolina, allegedly for making a sexual comment to a white woman. Despite the testimony of eyewitnesses, the killers, Robert and Larry Teel — known to be Klansmen — were acquitted by an all-white jury. …
Continue reading “Race Still Matters: An Interview with Timothy Tyson”
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Religious support for human rights may seem commonplace today, but this was not always the case. The growing consensus about human rights among religious leaders is a new development that has yet to be widely recognized and understood. This revolution in religious thought is exemplified by religious leaders’ current support for the Universal Declaration of …
Continue reading “Religious Communities in the Struggle for Human Rights”
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Text: And they came, bringing to him a paralytic carried by four men. And when they could not get near him because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him; and when they had made an opening, they let down the pallet on which the paralytic lay [Mark 2:3-4]. Except for Easter Sunday, perhaps, …
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Book Review The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. By Jonathan Kozol. Three Rivers Press, 432 pp. Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education. By Peter Sacks. University of California Press, 388 pp. Jonathan Kozol has made a career of documenting in book after heartbreaking book …
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One of the greatest fruits of high productivity and rising incomes in a country like the U.S. is the financial ability people have to retire. This possibility was beyond the imagination of pre-World War II workers and is still far beyond the expectations of most people living in Third World countries. For most of human …
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The new National Museum of the American Indian has become one of Washington, DC’s major tourist attractions. According to its own statements, the museum is “breathtaking . . a truly Native place.” Yet not all observers are impressed. In a devastating review, Edward Rothstein of the New York Times describes the museum’s approach as gratuitous …
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In the summer of 1966, my parents moved with their five children to a large house near the corner of 35th and Macomb Streets in Cleveland Park, a neighborhood in the middle of Northwest Washington, D.C., and, in those days, a lily-white enclave. My father, trained as a lawyer, was working for the federal government, …
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As spring breaks across the country and pushes north, two events remind us of humanity’s ascending powers in the realm of nature. Kenneth C. Edelin, M.D., is convicted by a Boston jury of the manslaughter of an anonymous emerging life born to an unknown, unwed black teen-ager — a 24-week fetus. In Princeton a renowned …
Continue reading “The Giving and Taking of Life: New Power at Life’s Thresholds”
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A 43-year-old woman rolls slowly out of bed, having dreamt the night before of her fifth-grade classroom — a room she knew well before taking disability leave. She makes her daily plea for a treatment that will allow her to get to the grocery store without tripping over her own feet. Meanwhile, a seven-year-old girl …
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A breakfast frequently served at my son’s school–where over half the children receive government-supported meals–consists of commercially produced French toast sticks and syrup. The list of ingredients on the package for this meal is as long as this paragraph. It includes not only partially hydrogenated soybean oil and high fructose corn syrup, but also more …
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Imperceptibly, but far more rapidly than we might imagine, we are entering a period in American history when the issues of work and organized labor may again become paramount. The historical forces now pushing those issues toward the top of the social agenda — and therefore toward serious consideration by the churches — are different …
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Book Review: A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America. By Michael Barkun. University of California Press, 238 pp. Text: One of my graduate school professors, commenting on a historian famous for his prolific reading and reviewing of recent work in American history, said, "We should be grateful to him. He reads all …
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My Minnesota hometown is the sort of place where neighbors look in on each other and leave the doors unlocked. As in Lake Woebegon, the children are all above average. In September one of those children brought a .22-caliber Colt semiautomatic to school and shot and killed two of his classmates. As with similar shootings …
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The tobacco industry likes to portray itself as just another American business, but the facts point to precisely the opposite conclusion. Evidence uncovered in the recent tobacco litigation demonstrates that the tobacco companies deliberately deceived the public into believing that their products were safe and non-addictive while conspiring to keep the industry’s knowledge to the …
Continue reading “What Every Progressive Christian Should Know About the Tobacco Industry”
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We are deceived if we place our trust in the current enthusiasm for human rights. Serious commitment to human rights will always be a minority obsession. Government policy may at times implement that commitment but cannot sustain it. After Vietnam and Watergate, many Americans are understandably euphoric about the Carter administration’s emphasis on human rights. …
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Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, by Susan Faludi. Morrow; 662pp. $27.50. My father, born at the turn of the century, was too young to see active duty in the First World War and too old to serve in the Second. But as a high school athletics teacher in a small Canadian city he …
