Drew Downs

Make a New Normal

June 2012

  • Have you seen one of these posters? We’ve moved to a small town, so I haven’t. This new campaign, with posters popping up in major cities across the country is two things that really get me excited. First, it is a guerrilla marketing campaign that arrests each person that sees a single poster. You stop,…

  • When I wrote the other day about a lack of wisdom, I wasn’t prepared for an even more stunning thesis: that ideology would trump both common sense and wisdom. I had taken for granted that common sense was often used to support the governing ideology. In the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision to uphold the already…

  • In the Boat

    a Homily for Proper 7B  –   Text: Mark 4: 35-41 Getting to the boat Andrew and Simon were fishing in the Sea of Galilee. They were casting nets into the water. As fishermen, this was their work. A stranger approaches them and says: “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.” This strange…

  • We like common sense. That folksy, personal anecdotal understanding of the world that just, you know, sort of…makes sense. That common sense that encourages parents to tell their three year-old to stop playing with a ball –and is horrified when they throw it one more time. We throw our arms up in frustration and wonder…

  • Fred Clark writes: Creationism requires a global conspiracy of lying scientists and/or a lying God. There’s no getting around it. Creationists may prefer not to think to much about the conspiratorial implications of what they’re arguing, but creationism just won’t work without the actual existence of such a “fraud so complex and extensive it involved…

  • Here’s another Spoon. Label Genetically Engineered Food | Common Dreams. Unlike people in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Ireland, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Brazil, China, Russia, New Zealand and other countries where labels are required, Americans don’t know if the food they eat has been genetically altered. As it stands, we’re hiding the cost…