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The gospel is unintelligible to most people today, especially in the West, because their own particular stories are remote from the story of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation that is narrated in the Bible. Our focus is introspective and narrow, confided to our own immediate knowledge, experience, and intuition. Trying desperately to get others, including God, to make us happy, we cannot seem to catch a glimpse of the real story that gives us a meaningful role.
Never trample on any soul though it may be lying in the veriest mire; for that last spark of self-respect is its only hope, its only chance; the last seed of a new and better life: the voice of God that whispers to it: "You are not what you ought to be, and you are not what you can be. You are still God's child, still an immortal soul. You may rise yet. and fight a good fight yet, and be a man once more, after the likeness of God who made you, and Christ who died for you!
If you have that spark that inspires other people, if you have a spark that gives resources to other people, that shares in really collaborative fashion, a spark of wit that kind of tells a story that gives people novel perspective of something, that's the kind of charisma that really leads to lasting power. It's not the kind of charisma that's seductive and self-aggrandizing. It's really a sort of a kind of social energy that really brings about the best in other people.
The idea that each individual has intrinsic, God-given value and is of infinite worth quite apart from any social contribution - an idea most pagans would have rejected as absurd - persists today as the ethical basis of western law and politics. Our secularized western idea of democratic society owes much to that early Christian vision of a new society - a society no longer formed by the natural bonds of family, tribe, or nation but by the voluntary choice of its members.
To invoke a Kierkegaardesque figure of speech, the beauty of the language of the Bible can be like a set of dentist's instruments nearly laid out on a table and hanging on a wall, intriguing in their technological complexity and with their stainless steel highly polished--until they set to work on the job for which they were originally designed. Then all of a sudden my reaction changes from "How shiny and beautiful they all are!" to "Get that damned thing out of my mouth!
The term pre-embryo is useful in the political arena - where decisions are made about whether to allow early embryo (now called pre-embryo) experimentation - as well as in the confines of a doctor's office, where it can be used to allay moral concerns that might be expressed by IVF patients. 'Don't worry,' a doctor might say, 'it's only pre-embryos that we're manipulating or freezing. They won't turn into real human embryos until after we've put them back into your body.'
Malcolm X broke with the N.O.I. in March 1964, and in that last 11 chaotic months, he spent most of the time outside of the United States. Nevertheless, he built two organizations in the spring of 1964. First, Muslim Mosque Incorporated, which was a religious organization that was largely based on members of the N.O.I. who left with him. It was spearheaded by James 67X or James Shabazz, who was his chief of staff. Then secondly was the Organization of Afro-American Unity.
It is not till it is discovered that high individual incomes will not purchase the mass of mankind immunity from cholera, typhus, and ignorance, still less secure them the positive advantages of educational opportunity and economic security, that slowly and reluctantly, amid prophecies of moral degeneration and economic disaster, society begins to make collective provision for needs which no ordinary individual, even if he works overtime all his life, can provide himself.
Worker-owned co-ops, on their own, floating in the market, tend to replicate the behavior of worker-owned capitalists in some circumstances. They sometimes develop positive participatory schemes, sometimes not. We know from the studies of worker-owned plywood companies in the US, they can tend to develop conservative attitudes, not socialist attitudes. So even though I'm an advocate of further democratization of the workplace, we also need to be building larger structures.
When new businesses open that are trying to attract people with cultural capital or cultural ambitions, they are often more expensive than traditional neighborhood stores and cafés, they offer different products, and they have a different atmosphere. Longtime residents may feel uncomfortable there. Structurally, as a group of gentrifiers gets bigger, there is less room for longtime residents. When it becomes a pattern and you can see the effects, we call that displacement.
Capitalism improves the quality of life for the working class not just because it leads to improved wages but also because it produces new, better, and cheaper goods.... Indeed, with capitalism, the emphasis shifted to producing goods as cheaply as possible for the masses--the working class--whereas artisans had previously produced their goods and wares mostly for the aristocracy. Under capitalism every business wants to cater to the masses, for that is where the money is.
The founders understood that democracy would inevitably evolve into a system of legalized plunder unless the plundered were given numerous escape routes and constitutional protections such as the separation of powers, the Bill of Rights, election of senators by state legislators, the electoral college, no income taxation, most governmental functions performed at the state and local levels, and myriad other constitutional limitations on the powers of the central government.
Ideas about the scope and meaning of freedom of speech do expand and contract with the times. At the moment, we live in an age that is very permissive, both legally and socially, on a wide range of subjects from Karl Marx to kinky sex. This has not always been the case. Things that even children freely see and read and hear today -- writings, pictures, words -- would have been banned as just plain obscene, even for adults, as recently as the middle of the twentieth century.
The overriding need is "to develop a new Planetary Humanism" that will seek to preserve human rights and enhance human freedom and dignity and will emphasize our commitment "to humanity as a whole." The underlying ethical principle "is the need to respect the dignity and worth of all persons in the world community." Thinkers as diverse as Peter Singer and Hans Küng also emphasize the need for a new global ethic beyond nationalistic, racial, religious, and ethnic chauvinism.
And no one has the right to say that no water-babies exist, till they have seen no water-babies existing; which is quite a different thing, mind, from not seeing water-babies; and a thing which nobody ever did, or perhaps will ever do. But surely ... they would have put it into spirits, or into the Illustrated News, or perhaps cut it into two halves, poor dear little thing, and sent one to Professor Owen, and one to Professor Huxley, to see what they would each say about it.
In a world where concepts are so often deployed in an ad hoc fashion, half explored before being displaced by others, it is immensely refreshing to encounter such serious and sustained attention to the building blocks of inquiry—and to the responsibilities thereby incurred. Designs on the Contemporary is a work of profound importance to the philosophy of anthropology. In conjunction with Rabinow’s other works, it creates a nonpareil, a configuration of thought with no equal.
The U.S. and, to a certain extent, countries in Europe as well, have experienced growing inequality within their population for decades - a small group of people own the lion's share of the wealth. Populists take advantage of this, and their policies are extremely hard to predict. And this has serious consequences. Companies shy away from risk, postponing their investment decisions in times of uncertainty, the stock markets get nervous and unemployment threatens to increase.
Intellectuals resist faith longer because they can: where ordinary people are helpless before the light, intellectuals are clever enough to spin webs of darkness around their minds and hide in them. That's why only Ph.D.s believe any of the 100 most absurd ideas in the world such as Absolute Relativism, or the Objective Truth of Subjectivism, of the Meaningfulness of Meaninglessness and the Meaninglessness of Meaning, which is the best definition of Deconstructionism I know.
We have to acknowledge that we can't look to manufacturing or natural resources to drive growth like we have in the past. Human capital, talent, and knowledge are our most important resources now. Every city has hidden seeds of opportunity waiting to be nurtured. Places like Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh are among my favorite cities. They have great universities, clusters of innovation across a range of industries, and pools of innovative and creative talent to build on.
For the three decades after WWII, incomes grew at about 3 percent a year for people up and down the income ladder, but since then most income growth has occurred among the top quintile. And among that group, most of the income growth has occurred among the top 5 percent. The pattern repeats itself all the way up. Most of the growth among the top 5 percent has been among the top 1 percent, and most of the growth among that group has been among the top one-tenth of one percent.
No one could argue with a straight face that the couples getting married today are much happier just because their wedding celebrations cost three times as much as those in 1980. Bigger mansions and costlier parties are wasteful in the same sense that larger antlers on all bull elk are wasteful. The good news is that simple changes in the tax system can eliminate much of this waste without having to deny people the right to decide for themselves how best to spend their money.
Eleanor Roosevelt's very helpful to a lot of children who cannot speak French, who do not write well. And Marie Souvestre is fierce. She tears up students' papers that are not, you know, perfect. And Eleanor Roosevelt goes around, again, being incredibly helpful to children in need, children in trouble. And her best friends are the naughtiest girls who are in trouble. And she is a leader. And she is encouraged to be a leader. And everybody falls in love with her. She's a star.
In India there was a sense of time that does not tick with modern clocks, just as there is a knowledge that is not gained through science and empirical experiments. In the modern West knowledge is of objective, finite particulars in historical time. India recognizes that kind of useful information: it calls it "lower knowledge." Higher knowledge (paravidya) proceeds differently, or rather it doesn't proceed at all but enters history full-blown on the morning of a new creation.
We need to remake and reinvent our housing system so that it supports the flexibility and mobility of our economic system broadly. Home-ownership is rewarded by the federal tax code, which made great sense when that piece of the American Dream, and all the consumption that came with it, was essential to rebuilding the economy. These days, however, it feels like a huge penalty to people who want to travel light within the new mobile economy without a mortgage to hold them back.
We, including many Christians, read the Bible through "eyes" conditioned by, and even accommodated to, modern Western culture plus the influences of messages and ideas from other cultures that are alien to the worldview of the biblical writers. Therefore, in order fully to understand the Bible and allow the Bible to absorb the world (rather than the world - culture - absorb the Bible) we must practice an "archaeology" of the biblical writers' implicit, assumed view of reality.
A fine lady; by which term I wish to express the result of that perfect education in taste and manner, down to every gesture, which heaven forbid that I, professing to be a poet, should undervalue. It is beautiful, and therefore I welcome it in the name of the author of all beauty. I value it so highly that I would fain see it extend not merely from Belgravia to the tradesman's villa, but thence, as I believe it one day will, to the laborer's hovel and the needlewoman's garret.
Who would you trust right now? Which bank would you trust? Which investment would you trust? Do you really want to put your money; do you want to suffer more of these losses that we just had? You know, these volatility that we see is just unexplainable by any rational standards. Nobody has any clue about how to explain this, and nobody wants to experience that. So, we hold more money back, we don't necessarily want to invest in the market and by default, people are saving more.
The anceints devoted a lifetime to the study of arithmetic; it required days to extract a square root or to multiply two numbers together. Is there any harm in skipping all that, in letting the school boy learn multiplication sums, and in starting his more abstract reasoning at a more advanced point. Where would be the harm in letting the boy assume the truth of many propositions of the first four books of Euclid, letting him assume their truth partly by faith, partly by trial?
Not understanding the process of a spontaneously-ordered economy goes hand-in-hand with not understanding the creation of resources and wealth. And when a person does not understand the creation of resources and wealth, the only intellectual alternative is to believe that increasing wealth must be at the cost of someone else. This belief that our good fortune must be an exploitation of others may be the taproot of false prophecy about doom that our evil ways must bring upon us.
When people want to inspire you to turn against some group of people, they'll often use empathy. When Obama wanted to bomb Syria, he drew our attention to the victims of chemical warfare. And in both of the Iraq wars, politicians said, "Look at the horrific things that are happening." I'm not a pacifist. I think the suffering of innocent people can be a catalyst for moral action. But empathy puts too much weight on the scale in favor of war. Empathy can really lead to violence.
When the press writes scare stories about the global labor supply draining jobs from rich to poor places, the story is usually presented as a "race to the bottom" simply in terms of wages. Capitalism supposedly looks for labor wherever labor is cheapest. This story is half wrong. A kind of cultural selection is also at work, so that jobs leave high-wage countries like the United States and Germany, but migrate to low-wage economies with skilled, sometimes overqualified workers.
Productive collaborations between family and school, therefore, will demand that parents and teachers recognize the critical importance of each other's participation in the life of the child. This mutuality of knowledge, understanding, and empathy comes not only with a recognition of the child as the central purpose for the collaboration but also with a recognition of the need to maintain roles and relationships with children that are comprehensive, dynamic, and differentiated.
Abraham Lincoln did have intellectual instincts, a tremendous curiosity on a broad range of subjects, and a near-photographic memory for what he read. He was, at the end of the day, a politician: politics were his heaven, said William Herndon. But Lincoln did take comfort in ideas and books, more so than almost any other president, and he went to books and ideas in moments of perplexity to sort things out. Philosopher, no, but thoughtful and "surprisingly well-read" for his day.
At the beginning of almost every industry, the available products and services are so expensive to own and complicated to use that only people with a lot of money and a lot of skill have access to them. A disruptive technology is an innovation that simplifies the product and makes it so affordable that a whole new population of people can now have one and use it at the beginning for simple applications, and then it improves to the point that it makes the old technology obsolete.
For three decades and longer we have been developing the ideas, science, and technological wherewithal to build a sustainable society. The public knows of these things only in fragments, but not as a coherent and practical agenda indeed the only practical course available. That is our fault and we should start now to put a positive agenda before the public that includes the human and economic advantages of better technology, integrated planning, coherent purposes, and foresight.
Out of the silver heat mirage he ran. The sky burned, and under him the paving was a black mirror reflecting sun-fire. Sweat sprayed his skin with each foot strike so that he ran in a hot mist of his own creation. With each slap on the softened asphalt, his soles absorbed heat that rose through his arches and ankles and the stems of his shins. It was a carnival of pain, but he loved each stride because running distilled him to his essence and the heat hastened this distillation.
The patterns of activity of neurons in sensory areas can be altered by patterns of attention. Experience coupled with attention leads to physical changes in the structure and future functioning of the nervous system. This leaves us with a clear physiological fact…moment by moment we choose and sculpt how our ever-changing minds will work. We choose who we will be in the next moment in a very real sense, and these choices are left embossed in physical form in our material selves.
My contention is that as long as you have other faculties-the emotional, psychological, intuitive faculties-you haven't lost yourself or even diminished yourself. Don't be ashamed when you're physically limited or dysfunctional; don't think that you're any less because of your condition. In fact, I feel I am even more myself than I was before I got this illness because I have been able to transcend many of the psychological and emotional limitations I had before I developed ALS.
The potential significance of Black feminist thought goes far beyond demonstrating that African-American women can be theorists. Like Black feminist practice, which it reflects and which it seeks to foster, Black feminist thought can create a collective identity among African-American women about the dimensions of a Black women's standpoint. Through the process of rearticulating, Black feminist thought can offer African-American women a different view of ourselves and our worlds
It is the modern feminists who are the real male chauvinists, lusting for reproductive freedom (sexual irresponsibility) like playboys and demanding empowerment, that is, envying and imitating not only males, but male fools, judging inner worth by outer performance, sacrificing being for doing, finding their identity in their worldly careers, not in their inner essence, in their physical and spiritual wombs and motherhoods. This is what Karl Stern called "the flight from woman."
There’s one thing that’s been 'learned' maybe from Tunisia and Egypt that I think is a mistake. And that is that the existing ruler has to resign. He doesn’t have to resign. You take all the supports out from under him; he falls. No matter what he wants to do. This is the distinction in the analyses between nonviolent coercion in which he has to resign, but he’s forced into it, and disintegration when the regime simply falls apart. There’s nobody left with enough power to resign.
If you look at how the US economy has suffered over the last 15 or 20 years, it's in significant part because we haven't done the investments in research and development and infrastructure and other public goods that are necessary for our growth. And, unfortunately, we're going to be feeling that overhang for a long time to come, because it's the investments we made in the 1950s and '60s and '70s that result in some of the greatest technological breakthroughs that we enjoy today.
Trump's dividing us. Yes, but people were already divided; Trump just expressed that division. And we have to find a way to, within a very heterogeneous party, even though we're the minority, we're a much more diverse party, of course, than the Republicans are. How do we talk about universal programs, have a universal message, and make sure we're talking about recent immigrants and non-immigrants, African-Americans, Latinos, LGBT people, as well? To me, that is a serious problem.
News at Work is a vivid, inside look at the collision of print journalism and electronic media. Based on close access to the leading news organizations in Buenos Aires, Boczkowski documents how contemporary journalism is caught in the grip of emulation; this spiral of imitation exacerbated further by global news media and their intensifying homogenization. The portrait of this transformation of the news is both fascinating and deeply worrying, and is guaranteed to provoke debate.
I do think the whole question of judicial accountability is a complicated one. On the one hand, you want to encourage judicial independence. And it's always, I think, problematic when an unpopular decision triggers a recall election. Because it sends a disempowering message to judges. On the other hand, it's the only way that voters have to rein in someone whose views are really so out of the mainstream of public opinion that they jeopardize the legitimacy of the judicial process.
Ethical religion affirms the continuity of progress toward moral perfection. It affirms that the spiritual development of the human race cannot be prematurely cut off, either gradually or suddenly; that every stone of offence against which we stumble is a stepping-stone to some greater good; that, at the end of days, if we choose to put it so, or, rather, in some sphere beyond the world of space and time, all the rays of progress will be summed and centred in a transcendent focus.
What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don't. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color "criminals" and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.
An environmental revolution is taking shape in the United States. This revolution has touched communities of color from New York to California and from Florida to Alaska - anywhere where African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans live and comprise a majority of the population. Collectively, these Americans represent the fastest growing segment of the population in the United States. They are also the groups most at risk from environmental problems.
Our justification from sins takes place at the point of saving faith, not at the point of water baptism, which usually occurs later. But if a person is already justified and has sins forgiven eternally at the point of saving faith, then baptism is not necessary for forgiveness of sins nor for the bestowal of new spiritual life. Baptism, then, is not necessary for salvation. But it is necessary if we are to be obedient to Christ, for he commanded baptism for all who believe in him.
Edward Abbey said you must brew your own beer; kick in you Tee Vee; kill your own beef; build your cabin and piss off the front porch whenever you bloody well feel like it. I already had a good start. As a teenager in rural Maine, after we came to America, I had learned hunting, fishing, and trapping in the wilderness. My Maine mentors had long ago taught me to make home brew. I owned a rifle, and I'd already built a log cabin. The rest should be easy. I thought I'd give it a shot.