I’m not much of a sports person. When I was in fifth grade, the only game my junior league soccer team won all year was the one that I missed due to illness (a coincidence, I’m sure). But nevertheless, I found this New Republic essay about the moral crisis facing professional sports in America interesting. [...]

What combination of environment and personality prompts ordinarily “good” people to do horrible, evil things? That must be just about the most vexing theological question of all, since we’re still asking it after two world wars and a century marked by a whole lot of violence. In 1971, the famous Stanford prison experiment illustrated the [...]

Here’s an interesting interview with ministrywatch.com about Kenneth Copeland (there might be an advertisement that plays first, sorry):

[HT: Achievable ends]
All this is interesting considering what Senator Grassley has been up to.
And just for fun, here’s some information on Joyce Meyer: her salary plus fringe benefits for 2006 was $250,000, plus access to a parsonage—which, it [...]

Over at Boundless, Heather Koerner makes the point that when Jesus talks about “the rich” in his sermons and parables, he’s talking about… us. (“Us,” for the sake of dicussion, being “typical American”—which describes me and most of the Christians I know.) Koerner describes her moment of realization:
...if you and I have sufficient food, decent [...]

Just watched an extremely compelling trailer for a documentary called Expelled.

You can watch additional trailers here.
It seems he’s not trying to prove a point either way about origin issues, but rather drawing attention to the lack of free speech in scientific academia.
Interested in seeing it? I know I am. Has anyone in academia [...]

This isn’t the most pressing ethical issue of the day, but it is something I (and probably you too, if you’re reading this) have bumped into: when you’re out and about with your laptop and need to check email, is it ethical to use an unsecured wireless internet connection without getting specific permission to do [...]

Is it possible to celebrate the work or art of somebody who has committed a terrible sin?
I think most of us would agree that being a sinner doesn’t disqualify you from being a good artist—if it did, there would be no art to appreciate at all. But when somebody goes seriously astray, does it retroactively [...]

This comic from ASBO Jesus has been bouncing around my mind for the past few days.

Most people do care about social justice; however, so often our indignation turns into paralysis due to the magnitude of the world’s problems. Personally, I’ve found it much easier to be incensed about how bad off the world is [...]

A quick follow-up to a post earlier this month about pacifism: at his blog, Mitch Lewis explores the topic of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s pacifism and his participation in the Hitler assassination plot. Mitch is responding to an article by Ron Osbourn about Bonhoeffer. Well worth reading.

Why do people protest and mourn when a meerkat is killed by a natural predator on “Animal Planet,” but we’re weirdly unaffected by weekly reports of human violence, war, and death? Wired’s Tony Long reflects on the ways we react to violence and atrocity, and wonders at the cost of our desensitization to it all:
I’ve [...]