Ethics and Morality
‘Spare’: Prince Harry’s ‘todger’ a distraction in memoir of betrayal
Reading Time: 5 minutes Among many juicy tidbits in British royal Prince Harry’s newly released tell-all memoir, Spare, is his recollection of treating his frost-bit penis, suffered during a 2011 Antarctic expedition, using cream his late mother used on her lips. Wrote Daily Beast senior editor Davi
The United States has an atonement problem
Reading Time: 6 minutes Throughout our history, but particularly since 2016, when Donald Trump first rode down that ill-fated escalator at Trump Tower to announce his presidential candidacy, it has grown ever clearer that Americans have a serious problem with atonement. We tend to run hellbent away
To forgive or not to forgive
Reading Time: 9 minutes Raised Roman Catholic, I was indoctrinated in childhood with the idea that forgiveness is a cardinal duty of faith, which then saddled me with knee-jerk guilt whenever I failed to bestow it. But as I think objectively about this moral ethos many decades later, I’m unconvinced
One man’s transformative journey from Republican to Democrat
Reading Time: 4 minutes My longtime best pal, Paul Sauser, a recent conservative-Republican-turned-Democrat and an evangelical Christian now uneasily reassessing his faith (without chucking it altogether), has, like many, Americans experienced somewhat of a religious and political transformation in
What might 100,000 more years of evolution do for the future of morality?
Reading Time: 2 minutes It was a bawdy planet for hundreds of millions of years; the whole of it reeked of sex without a whiff of morals in the air. Then, rather late in the day, a mere several thousand years ago, humans began offering moral codes recommending ‘licit’ sexual expression. But humans f
‘Memento Mori’: To live with the prospect of death (Strange New Worlds)
Reading Time: 9 minutes Like any self-respecting Trekkie, I learned the basics of gunpower from Star Trek: The Original Series. One of TOS‘s most memorable scenes comes from “Arena” (Season 1, Episode 18), when Captain Kirk, trapped on a planet with minimal resources, has to use his wits to survive
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
An ethical maze: Designing babies for a greater good?
Reading Time: 16 minutes “At ten months old, we were told he would need a heart transplant. There was no cure for his condition, so we would have to go to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital at some point. If they had a bed. And a heart. And agreed to the procedure.” Great Ormond Street, the fam
An unequal tale of two liars: Smollett and Trump
Reading Time: 4 minutes Actor Jussie Smollett was convicted on December 9 of five counts of “disturbing the peace,” technically speaking, in a bizarre case in which the gay Black actor falsely claimed two Donald Trump-supporting men attacked him on a Chicago street while yelling homophobic and racia
Buddhist Bhutan is better at sex ed than Christian America
Reading Time: 5 minutes The tiny Himalayan Buddhist nation of Bhutan in some important ways has, so to speak, outstripped majority-Christian United States in throwing off the dogmatic religious shackles that have traditionally constrained its sex ed policies. Despite the two nation’s very different
Of faith and fetal cells, COVID and cannibalism
Reading Time: 5 minutes The Catholic Church has been surprisingly nuanced in weighing fetal-cell use in coronavirus vaccines vs. life-saving vaccine efficacy in advising faithful.