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Politics and Religion

2015-05-05T14:07:36-06:00

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.

Helpful hint: media and pundits OK w/ Piss Christ but not Pam Geller are not “hypocrites”

Last updated on: May 5, 2015 at 2:07 pm By Jane the Actuary

– they just don’t support the First Amendment. So reads my (1000th) tweet earlier today, after reading repeated complaints from the Right that the Left and the media are being hypocrites in having mocked opponents of Piss Christ, the Virgin Mary in dung, and other Great Achievements in Art, and having assiduously defended the Brooklyn Museum of Art in displaying these images, now being indifferent to the mocking of Mormons that is the whole of the Book of Mormon Broadway musical,... Read more

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2015-05-04T11:39:59-06:00

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.

Two questions no one’s asking on the Obama Library

Last updated on: May 4, 2015 at 11:39 am By Jane the Actuary

1. What’s the cost? 2. What’s the content? The background: The Tribune is now reporting that the library coming to Chicago is now a done deal; the only unanswered question is which major city park will have its acreage sliced off to become museum grounds, parking, the First Lady’s Garden, and the like. With respect to question 1, it is already apparent that, despite claims that the library will be built with private funds, there will be costs a-plenty for... Read more

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2015-05-04T08:01:43-06:00

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.

Community Colleges: low-hanging fruit?

Last updated on: May 4, 2015 at 8:01 am By Jane the Actuary

I’m still mulling over Putnam’s book, especially in connection with the whole mess in Baltimore. So the whole issue of daycare and universal free all-day preschool, which progressives offer as one of their first-line solutions to poverty, just strikes me as suspect: I’m just highly skeptical of claims that, if you don’t provide an “enriching” environment to infants, toddlers, and preschool children, with 1,000 books before kindergarten (the new initiative at my local library and, I imagine, elsewhere), a caregiver... Read more

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2015-05-01T20:17:19-06:00

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.

From the library: Our Kids, by Robert D. Putnam

Last updated on: May 1, 2015 at 8:17 pm By Jane the Actuary

Yes, finally, after having mentioned this book in several prior posts, I’m finally writing about this more directly! And longtime readers will know that I generally don’t write “book reviews” in any conventional sense; what I do is more a sort of note-taking with commentary. The subtitle of the book is “The American Dream in Crisis,” and the basic gist of it is that, in many ways, compared to the generation of the author’s upbringing, in the 50s (he graduated... Read more

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2015-04-30T18:04:54-06:00

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 in-laws are coming. . .

Last updated on: April 30, 2015 at 6:04 pm By Jane the Actuary

Need I say more? How about the fact that they’re hypercritical, about my claimed lack of proper manners as a host, and my housekeeping ability, in particular, and after their last visit here they complained, not to me, but to my husband? (He defended me, but it’s still no fun to be in his shoes.) Oh, and, what’s more, their life experience is so narrow that they simply don’t understand that German and American manners and expectations are different. So... Read more

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2015-04-30T11:34:57-06:00

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 unanswered “why” of the Baltimore riots

Last updated on: April 30, 2015 at 11:34 am By Jane the Actuary

This is more of a question than anything else: What causes a riot? Sure, we’re hearing that, in the case of Baltimore, and in particular the part of Baltimore that’s “ground zero” for the riots, is especially impoverished, either as a result of longstanding segregation, according to Slate, the combination of corrupt city government and failed Great Society programs, according to Rich Lowry (National Review contributor writing in Politico), or Congress’s unwillingness to appropriate new sums of money for child... Read more

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2015-04-29T07:43:37-06:00

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.

$158,775

Last updated on: April 29, 2015 at 7:43 am By Jane the Actuary

That’s the cost of a year of private-room nursing home care in Connecticut, according to a survey by Genworth Financial, which appeared in the paper today via an AP article. The national median is $91,250. That’s a lot of money. For comparison, the survey also provides the seemingly-cheaper cost of home health aide services, $45,760 at median — I say “seemingly-cheaper,” though, because that’s the amount for 44 hours/week of care, which assumes the scenario of a parent living with... Read more

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2016-08-16T09:49:14-06:00

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.

A (probably blindingly obvious) observation about education, class, and cohorts

Last updated on: August 16, 2016 at 9:49 am By Jane the Actuary

I keep dribbling out observations from the book I’m reading, Robert Putnam’s Our Kids. Here’s another one: One of Putnam’s key points is that in the last two generations there’s been a significant divergence in the family lives of the college-educated/middle-class and the high school-educated/working-class. The former are more likely to attend church, have stable marriages (or any marriage at all), read to their children, encourage them to participate in after-school activities, have high expectations for their academic success, etc.... Read more

Actuarial/Retirement Issues

2016-10-13T07:50:39-06:00

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.

Secularism and Modernity

Last updated on: October 13, 2016 at 7:50 am By Jane the Actuary

You’ve heard this (or a variant thereof) before, right? With hardly any significant exceptions, religion recedes whenever human security and well-being rises . . . Presumably, those who deplore the decline of religion in the world today would not welcome the sort of devastation and despair that could give religion its second wind. There is no other plausible scenario that could halt the slide, for a fairly obvious reason: the recent rapid growth of mutual knowledge, thanks to the global... Read more

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secularism

2015-04-28T08:46:57-06:00

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.

A few comments on the riots

Last updated on: April 28, 2015 at 8:46 am By Jane the Actuary

So once again we have a city in chaos as originally-peaceful protests turn violent and the police seemingly turn their backs. Here’s The Economist for a quick summary, and further coverage from Reuters and AP. I don’t really have a sense yet of the severity of the whole thing, though we turned on CNN last night, which we don’t usually do, and my son* was most shocked by the report of someone cutting a hole in a fire hose being used... Read more

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