Who gets to declare a cultural debate over? According to a recent RNS column, late debate participants, critics, and allies to those directly impacted by the issues being debated are the ones who get to declare differences “unbridgeable” and the debate itself a draw. I find this fascinating, and perhaps you will too. In order: […]
Not magic but science
Mechanical engineer Bill Nye, also known as The Science Guy, has a new popular science program on Netflix called Bill Nye Saves the World. During the first episode, Nye dons a light blue lab coat and demonstrates the mechanics of climate change and the greenhouse effect. “As I hold the bulb of this thermometer,” Nye says, “the liquid […]
Fire, smoke, and dreams (with Arundhati Roy)
In The End of Imagination, Arundhati Roy describes with exquisite pacing what nationalism, fundamentalism, and militarism have yielded across India and Pakistan over the last thirty years. As she recounts the mayhem (including murder, staged terrorism, and activist intimidation in the countryside and on college campuses), Roy also writes of alternatives: An altogether different coalition of castes, one that […]
Hope and realism
The white race in America will not admit the Negro to equal rights if it is not forced to do so.” —Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 1932, via James Cone Niebuhr wrote wrote this statement 25-30 years before the height of the civil rights movement. It suggests a clarity about US race relations […]
Bishops and kings
Last spring a large group gathered in Washington, D.C. to talk about the long shadow of poverty. The Declaration Initiative is the vision of Dr. Claire Gaudiani and aims to end poverty nationwide by 2026, the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Americans want schools, homes and public amenities that prepare and sustain them to […]
Participating in the change
In the last few pages of Confronting Injustice, Umair Muhammad writes that deep social change doesn’t just require mass action. It also requires mass participation in sociopolitical institutions and the social movements that must see old institutions replaced. It’s not enough, Muhammad argues, for scholars and critics to make radical claims without connecting them to […]