Why aren’t schools robustly teaching critical thinking? No time
Reading Time: 5 minutes American public schools are teaching our kids too much and too little simultaneously. It’s too much what to think and not enough how—like how to think critically, analytically, about all the factual information they’re being taught. The critical “how” responsibility of educat
Saudi state executes apostates. Is U.S. immune to such religious brutality?
Reading Time: 6 minutes I can confirm firsthand from past decades I spent living and working in Saudi Arabia that the desert kingdom’s citizens are—as most Americans are—generally warm, generous, and kindly folks. Extraordinarily so, in fact. But the Saudi government and presumably most citizens als
Why do we keep blaming the poor for their poverty?
Reading Time: 7 minutes Is poverty’s root cause more nurture than nature?
Go ahead, ask any schoolkid to name just one historical heretic
Reading Time: 4 minutes Quick! When in your American schooling up to higher education did you ever learn about the rich, global history of religious skepticism? “Never” is the correct answer. You might have been taught a thin sprinkling of heresy, perhaps, glancing for a moment on the lurid burnings
Faith and sexuality collide in Finland
Reading Time: 5 minutes Two court cases about faith and sexuality have been dubiously characterized as “shocking” and “a ‘canary in the coalmine’ for freedom of speech throughout the Western world,” according to human rights lawyer Paul Coleman of the conservative, religion-promoting Alliance Defend
U.S. vulnerable to global surge in faith-tinged authoritarianism
Reading Time: 4 minutes In certain respects, many United States’ political and opinion leaders today are more apologists for Russian authoritarianism than defenders of American democracy. Elite right-wing icons of both nations, emulating past fascist dictators, fetishize and selfishly wield power, r
Turns out, falsely shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater may be okay
Reading Time: 6 minutes “It’s Time to Stop Using the ‘Fire in a Crowded Theater’ Quote.” This headline over a 2012 opinion piece in The Atlantic magazine concluded—wrongly, I think—that opinionators and random others had erroneously applied the famous quote to free-speech debates for decades and sho
COVID-19 is Boston’s 1721 smallpox epidemic redux
Reading Time: 5 minutes Although the coronavirus pandemic is clearly starting to ebb, as of March 9, 2022 an average of 35,496 Americans were still be being hospitalized daily with the disease, and it’s still killing 1,451 citizens each day on average, the New York Times reported. So, the current pa
Why are we so timid in defending Ukraine? It’s MAD.
Reading Time: 5 minutes MAD is the excellent reason why American President Joe Biden—along with the rest of the West—is so seemingly over-cautious in trying to defend Ukraine against the brutal Russian invasion now in progress. MAD is the canny acronym for Mutually Assured Destruction, which, in bri
Hearing loss, failing eyesight, and the struggles we try to hide
Reading Time: 5 minutes Let’s talk about discrimination. Not the racial type: I’m talking about the ability of human hearing to discriminate, to distinguish the all-important but often whisper-subtle edges of what most people experience as the familiar sounds of vowels and consonants. For some of us
The Students’ Religious Belief Protection Act protects no one
Reading Time: 4 minutes Columnist’s note: My Monday essay titled “Hearing loss, failing eyesight, and the struggles we try to hide“ did not properly display temporarily but that glitch is now fixed. The correctly displayed article is accessible via the linked headline in this note. The so-called Stu
New research says: Most Americans love God but ignore his impotence
Reading Time: 4 minutes (Writer’s note: If you’d like to receive emailed links to each of my columns when posted, please sign up here.) A recent Pew Research Center survey on U.S. attitudes toward the so-called “problem of evil” (and implied divine impotence) brightly underscores how the perpetuatin