Here are some random things I’ve been reading/discussing online lately:

  1. The Lead: Study explores educational level and religiosity.  Note: the results aren’t what you’d likely expect.
  2. Bishop Pierre Whalon on “What is Anglicanism”
  3. Preaching to their own Choirs: on how folks didn’t change their minds about heaven or hell after reading Rob Bell or Francis Chan
  4. Education needs a digital age upgrade (NYT)
  5. A National Debt of $14 Trillion? Try $211 Trillion. (NPR)
  6. Why Bank Bailouts haven’t led to jobs (Harvard Business Review)
  7. Stuff on Adam & Eve, evolution etc… (seems like this has been a popular topic, so I have a few links: Hermeneutics, Origins & Ethics (JD Kirk), Evangelicals Question the Existence of Adam and Eve (Jesus Needs New PR), The Search for the Historical Adam (Christianity Today)
  8. About Original Sin being the only empirically provable Christian doctrine
  9. The Brain on Trial (The Atlantic)
  10. Bert and Ernie will not marry, despite the efforts of signers of an online petition (BBC).  Money quote: A statement from the show’s makers said: “They remain puppets and do not have a sexual orientation.”
  11. Harry Potter and Running from Death (Front Porch Republic)
  12. Why Hospitals in Portland are Banning Early Births (The Atlantic), how inductions and c-sections are actually harming the health of mother and baby.
  13. The Least Pivotal Time in American History (The Atlantic)
  14. Why bother with Marshal McLuhan? (The New Atlantis)
  15. What Neuroscience cannot tell us about ourselves (The New Atlantis)
  16. Place and Placelessness in America (The New Atlantis)
  17. Happy Birthday Herbert Hoover: The Lost Legacy of a Hated President (The Atlantic)
  18. The New America (Church & Culture): “It’s now official. The United States is ‘bigger, older, more Hispanic and Asian and less wedded to marriage and traditional families than it was in 1990.'”
  19. Anglicanism’s Magisterial Authority (The Creedal Christian)
  20. Speaking of Hoover.  At the end of the campaign, when he arrived in Palo Alto, he opened a telegram that read “Vote for Roosevelt and make it unanimous.” (Google Books)
  21. Europe’s Conservative Confusion: nearly every government on the continent is center right.  So why can’t they get along and figure out how to get along and save the EU economies? (Foreign Policy)
  22. What isn’t behind the London Riots (Called the “Shopping Riots” now by some) (The Washington Post)
  23. Can Motherhood be Criminalized? 
  24. Where have all the Girls Gone? It’s true: western money and advice really did help fuel the explosion of sex selection in Asia. (Foreign Policy)
  25. The Kids Aren’t Alright: What’s really behind Britain’s wave of youth violence? (Foreign Policy)
  26. The Sons of Brixton: Cameron’s Failed Politics of Austerity (Foreign Affairs)
  27. Bearing the Cost of War: Why the U.S. Should Raise Taxes — Just As it Has in Previous Conflicts (Foreign Affairs) “Most Americans have made no sacrifices at all for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The burden should be shared. It’s long past time for Congress to enact a wartime tax, something it’s done in almost every war in the past.”
  28. GetReligion talks about the various Adam & Eve and Evangelical stories out there recently–and who should have credited who…
  29. Augustine’s Origin of Species: How the great theologian might weigh in on the Darwin debate. (Christianity Today)
  30. Two Churches that closed down the show (Internet Monk)
  31. Peter Berger talks about the accusation of being “On the Wrong side of History.”
  32. The Fading Shadow of the Habsburgs
  33. The Progressive Crisis

Well… there you have it.  Let me know what you think of any of these pieces.