This question is not really fair. After all, there are many people out in the suburbs who don't have it easy and there are many people living in the city who have never had to overcome serious challenges. Nonetheless, it is my prejudice that those people with the highest character,…
Periodically, I become a bit disoriented in the swirl of life, which gives rise to the question: “Who am I?” We aren’t static beings, of course. We are complex adaptive systems, communities of relatively simple cellular life that number in the trillions. Many of “our” cells (in fact, the great…
Here's another obstacle to objectively evaluating a person. There are many aspects of people. If you are attracted to one aspect strongly, you might (subconsciously) allow that characteristic to serve as a token for that person's other personality characteristics. As this article from PsyBlog indicates, this is called the "Halo…
People have all kinds of hobbies. Some people like to knit. Other people like to collect stamps. I like to go to church while playing the role of “anthropologist.”
When I am thinking about visiting a church, my biggest decision is deciding what church to visit. That was my decision three days ago. I had already been to a stern and humorless evangelical church. The thing I remembered about that church was the scriptural quotation featured on the T-shirts of hundreds of the people attending: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.” It was a quote from Proverbs 1:7. I remember thinking “Of all the quotes they could’ve chosen from the Bible, this one is strange indeed. Any good teacher knows that the best students are driven by natural curiosity and a good dose of skepticism, not by fear.”
Back to my task of choosing a church. Last week, I just happened to be in the car listening to a fundamentalist A.M. radio station when I heard neocon talk show host Paul McGuire ranting about a new crop of churches designed for young people, churches that allegedly don’t spend enough time on the Bible but, instead, cater to the social needs of the congregation. Maguire’s rant went on for several minutes, long enough for me to conclude that I simply had to go to one of these new hip churches to see for myself.
As it turns out, one of those new “emerging” churches is located about …
I bristled yesterday as I read yet another faux-controversy concocting article in my misguided home town paper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. You see, Body Worlds is coming to my town and the morality “experts” are getting restless. The “concern” is that maybe we shouldn’t be staring at dead bodies. The morality experts quoted…