Culture
What’s going on, who we are, and what the big deal is.
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On Spelling It Out
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2 min read
It is normal today to say we live in an abnormal time. We think everything is damn confusing. Or not at all. We speak out of one side of our mouths that this is a time of all this conflicting data, but ideologues speak with such consistency and confidence. We recognize complex problems and we…
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Who do you say that Jesus is?
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2 min read
In Sunday’s gospel story, we had the famous pair of questions Jesus asks: Who do people say that I am? Who do you say that I am? As I was writing about this idea for our parish newsletter, I realized something important. These two questions have two more hidden questions, or more precisely, two hidden…
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Why do comedians defend what’s unfunny?
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2 min read
It’s old news now, but an idea has been nipping at me for some time. There was a surprising dust up involving the comedian Daniel Tosh and a blogger that responded to a joke about rape. There are many details about the two that are almost irrelevant to the story because it became a story…
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The Dream 2012
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3 min read
On the 49th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, it seems fitting to reflect on where we are in fulfilling it. Back in January, I wrote this for King’s birthday: It should surprise none of us that a leader villified by the conservative white community as “uppity” would become as…