Category: Social Trends
The Christian Post and Sojourners
Apologies for returning to this theme yet again, but this is what happens when discussions occur and I have words to say. At any rate, The Christian Post took a gander at Mere-O today and provided a reasonably accurate overview...
Sojourners and the Controversy that Will Not Go Away
Sojourners, the leading organization of the evangelical left, can’t seem to escape the controversy that erupted in March when it rejected an advertisement from Believe out Loud, an organization trying to “significantly increase the number of local churches and denominations...
Carrying the Fallen
Three American flags draped the coffins lying on the cargo floor of my C-17. It was only three hours earlier that I had received a phone call informing me that my crew was to fly from Europe to America; no...
Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and the Abortion Debate or Why You Should Buy Matt’s Book
In Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish he argues that over the past 200 years the emphasis of western justice has shifted from punishing the body to punishing the soul. To support this he cites a number of shifts in...
Too Awesome Not to Share
From the video department here at Mere-O comes this offering, which is predicated on the simple premise of modernity: we will, because we can. Of course, we never see him come down. And that is the rub. Second, what is...
Susan Sontag on Beauty and Gender
Today as I set-up shop in a line at the Los Angeles DMV I happened to read an incisive essay published in Vogue forty years ago. The article was written by Susan Sontag, and my profit from it proves that...
Thomas Says: Killing Plants and Animals
As a way of getting my blogging going, I thought I’d start a series of posts on some teachings of Thomas Aquinas. I think this will be interesting (at least to me) because Thomas covers so much material in easy-to-digest...
Autonomy, Eternity, and Value
We are thus stuck between two unrealistic views of the autonomy of the individual. The first is that the self can be autonomous forever; the second is that only the autonomous deserve to live at all.” (p. 152) Peter Lawler’s...
Review: Stuck with Virtue
We also must return to Pascal for a reminder that the biotechnological project cannot turn us human beings from mysterious into manufactured beings. The effort to deny the reality of the fundamental unpredictability of human life that is intrinsic to...
I met a smile on my way…
Imperturbable smiles are pitiable things, somewhat reminiscent of the Little Prince’s rose who took naive delight in her four thorns, unjustifiably proud of the one thing that made her vulnerable—and laughable; or of Voltaire’s Candide always optimistically re-interpreting the facts...