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Politics and Religion

2010-10-11T06:00:10-04:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

TV preachers

Last updated on: October 11, 2010 at 6:00 am By Gene Veith

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I’m on the road, down south. Saturday night in my motel room I surfed channel after channel of TV preachers. I became weirdly fascinated and watched them to get a sense of what they were teaching. I heard an evangelist of the prosperity gospel (using the text in which Jesus calls Peter to launch out into the deep, whereupon he caught so many fish his net broke and his fish started to sink), a female Methodist minister preaching against bullying,... Read more

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TV preachers

2010-10-11T05:26:36-04:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Anti-colonialism

Last updated on: October 11, 2010 at 5:26 am By Gene Veith

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What do you think of Dinesh D’Souza’s thesis–developed in his new book The Roots of Obama’s Rage–that Barack Obama and his convictions can best be explained in terms of his father’s anti-colonialism? Here Mr. D’Souza summarizes his argument: But who was Barack Obama Sr., and what did he want? Do the views of the senior Obama help clarify what the junior Obama is doing in the Oval Office? Lets begin with President Obama, who routinely castigates investment banks and large... Read more

2010-10-11T05:00:55-04:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

“PowerPoint corrupts absolutely”

Last updated on: October 11, 2010 at 5:00 am By Gene Veith

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I can’t believe I missed this critique of PowerPoint in Wired by Edward Tufte, which came out a year ago: Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn’t. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall. Yet slideware -computer programs for presentations -is everywhere:... Read more

technology

PowerPoint

2010-10-08T06:51:12-04:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The rest of what I said: on colleges’ responsibilities

Last updated on: October 8, 2010 at 6:51 am By Gene Veith

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The unedited version of one of the questionsin the interview the Washington Examiner did with me: 3. Do colleges and universities bear a responsibility to nurture the spiritual lives of their students? If so, how are they doing, or how could they do better? I think distinctly religious colleges do, such as Patrick Henry College where I work and the array of Catholic institutions in the D.C. area. I don’t think secular or state-funded universities do, and when they try... Read more

Education

2010-10-08T06:41:50-04:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Point/counterpoint: Military Spending

Last updated on: October 8, 2010 at 6:41 am By Gene Veith

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In our efforts to raise the quality of discourse in American politics, let us try something different. We will take two arguments on opposing sides of an issue. We will then discuss which makes the best case. Kirk Anderson alerted me to two columns on military spending. One argues that in our zeal to cut government expenditures, we had better not touch the defense budget. The other argues that any attempt to cut government spending must cut the military. Which... Read more

2010-10-08T06:38:45-04:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Maslow’s hierarchy has a new pinnacle of human achievement

Last updated on: October 8, 2010 at 6:38 am By Gene Veith

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Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has been a landmark of psychology, used in education and even church ministries. Now some psychologists are revising his model, making the pinnacle not “self-actualization” but, in the words of a Christianity Today column by Elrena Evans, “something more self-giving”: Psychologists are considering a shift to famed psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Long a fixture in the training of educators and workforce managers, Maslow’s pyramid argues that humans’ basic needs (food, water, air, sleep) must... Read more

2010-10-07T06:00:43-04:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The rest of what I said: on religion & facts

Last updated on: October 7, 2010 at 6:00 am By Gene Veith

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There wasn’t room for everything that I said in that interview the Washington Examiner did with me. So as not to waste anything, I’ll post the outtakes here: 1. A recent Pew study found that atheists and agnostics scored higher on a religion quiz than did people of faith. How important are facts to faith? And/or can God thrive when his followers lack an understanding of the facts? Some people think religion is just a matter of what goes on... Read more

Pew Study of Religious Knowledge

Problem of Evil

2010-10-07T05:45:53-04:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

When conservative Christians were politically liberal

Last updated on: October 7, 2010 at 5:45 am By Gene Veith

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My point was apparently not clear in yesterday’s post about “government as a force for secularization.” I’m trying to think through the history of conservative Christian’s stance towards politics. There was indeed a time when many if not most conservative Christians were politically liberal. I grew up in the buckle of the Bible belt, as they say, in small town Oklahoma, where most people were Southern Baptists. (Not us, we belonged to a liberal denomination.) But virtually everyone was liberal... Read more

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2010-10-07T05:00:47-04:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The missing pro-family issue

Last updated on: October 7, 2010 at 5:00 am By Gene Veith

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Al Mohler calls “pro-family” activists on a major blind spot: As [University of Washington] Professor [Mark] Smith surveyed the front lines of the culture war, he was surprised, not so much by the issues of hot debate and controversy, but by an issue that was obvious for its absence – divorce. “From the standpoint of simple logic, divorce fits cleanly within the category of ‘family values’ and hence hypothetically could represent a driving force in the larger culture war,” he... Read more

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divorce

2010-10-07T04:59:33-04:00

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

No-hitter in the playoffs

Last updated on: October 7, 2010 at 4:59 am By Gene Veith

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Baseball’s playoffs–generally the best games of the year–got off to an amazing start as the Phillies’ Roy Halladay pitched the second no-hitter in the history of postseason play. (The first was in 1956.): In the last 54 years of baseball history prior to Wednesday night, there had been 952 postseason games played, all of which shared two common traits of omission: None had ever included a no-hit game, and none had ever been graced by Harry Leroy Halladay. But on... Read more

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