It’s almost always a category mistake to generalize about “religion.” This is such an amorphous category that it is like attempting to generalize about all people who have ever labored. Our stance should indeed be agnostic before we dig into cases.

Hardwired into religious traditions, as part of longstanding sensibilities, are teachings about justice, care for the weak, and attention to the common good: teachings that command nontrivial respect in the public sphere.... Common sense plus the moral legacies of our religious traditions add up to a combined weight that is not trivial. We may not be able to fight a riptide, but if we can fund a war, then surely we can fund a school.

What follows is a case study in media polling that we should not trust, but rather treat as our enemy. It makes a few points about health...

Like many of my fellow citizen/consumers groomed by algorithms that feed us our personal news, I like it when algorithms feed me stories...

(Part of a thread to share poems or poetry-adjacent writing, as discussed here .) We  cannot say how this cascading wreck  of complacent...

What should this blog say about the ongoing slaughter in Gaza? So much is already being written that adding my voice may be redundant,...

While talking with my friend Ron as he drove through Nebraska, I quoted him a James McMurtry song: “Out here in the middle where the...

This is to share and make a smallish comment about a jaw-dropping image that I've just seen, fresh in my newsfeed from Nation magazine....

Reading my news feed today, two things somewhat related to this and this recent posts struck me as worth noting. There is now...

Counting my home in East Tennessee and a small summer cabin in Wisconsin in an old pasture where my Mom grew up, I have four Senators and...

Little by little, I have come to a realization that (as someone I read on youtube articulated it) “Holy shit, I think I’m a Miley Cyrus...

Recently I asked my dentist—with whom I have chatted about teeth and sports for years—how long he thought it would take his office to get...

This post is cross-published here on Narrative Paths Journal I fielded a query from a University of Tennessee campus newspaper about...

I went to my local farmer’s market here in the north woods of Wisconsin, feeling happy for the beautiful day and the chance to be support...

Last summer, on a road trip from Minneapolis to Kansas City, I passed through a town in Iowa where I lived from age two to five.  Here is...

Without strong Democratic leadership, without mass protest, and with the economy so disrupted that I become confused as to how strikes...

I don’t often recirculate comments from others here, but sometimes I make an exception, and I'm doing do so for this interview with Noam...

Imagine that a shark has a fish literally inside its jaws, but cannot bite down. Prayer is like that. It is like a “toxin” that makes you...

NOTE: I am publishing tomorrow, in October 2024, a note to link back to this article which has continuing relevance even though it first...

…Or… if you want to watch, or already did—if you are into that sort of thing—let’s compare notes. The production was fascinating in...