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There's at least one Christian denomination that won't be singing "peace on earth" this holiday season. A diocese of the Episcopal Church has seceded and plans to align with a South American branch of the Anglican Church, the Anglican Province of the Southern Cone. (For readers unfamiliar with the ...
Richard Florida, author of the business bestsellers The Rise of the Creative Class and The Flight of the Creative Class, has pointed out time and time again that world-class cities need to attract world-class creative talent if they want to remain competitive. Now, it appears that basic idea of ...
Last month, Senator Chuck Grassley asked six notorious preachers of the prosperity gospel to account for some highly questionable expenditures, in light of their ministries' non-profit status. So far, it seems that only one of the six, Joyce Meyer, has complied. Three others - Benny Hinn, Paula ...
Last Thursday, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney gave a speech in which he argued that his Mormon religious beliefs should not prevent Americans from voting for him. I do not define my candidacy by my religion. A person should not be elected because of his faith nor should he be ...
A few days ago, I had an epiphany that I think sheds considerable light on the difference between liberal and fundamentalist believers. This principle seems to me to be underappreciated, and if it was more widely understood, I think it might head off some of the misunderstandings which I've seen ...
Earlier in the week, I had the unique opportunity to hear Peter Semmelhack, CEO of New York-based Bug Labs, describe how his start-up company was radically disrupting the traditional consumer electronics industry. Using a modular, open source approach, Bug Labs is focused on bringing the Long ...
Last year, in a previous installment of Theocracy Watch, I wrote about unconstitutional government-supported prison ministries which target a literal captive audience. Many Christian evangelists view these ministries as a great opportunity to preach to those who can't escape, as if the prisons were ...
 “Geographical manuals in US schools show an amputated Brazil, without the Amazon and the Pantanal. This is how students are taught that these are âinternationalâ areas, in other words: this is how the North American public is prepared for the âinternationalisationâ of these areas ...
A recent column by Katha Pollitt, The Atheist's Dilemma, laments how atheists would like to take away what people value and offer nothing in return: But if all you can offer people is reasons to quit their religion—which also often means their community, their family, their support system and ...
In its issue of 22 April 1996, the New Yorker Magazine published a parody map of Montana, by cartoonist Roz Chast. The state ranks 4th in surface (after Alaska, California and Texas), but 44th in population, giving it the 3rd lowest population density (before Wyoming and Alaska). This ...
Q: How do you get a blonde out of a tree? A: Wave According to this map – and if you really believe that blondes have less brains –a nasty fall like that is more likely to happen in the central parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland, where at least 80% of the population is fair-haired, the ...
“Is this what will become of the Earth’s surface?” asks the entry for 22 September 2007 of Astronomy Picture of the Day, a website affiliated with Nasa (judging from its url).“The surface of the Earth is broken up into several large plates that are slowly shifting. About 250 million years ago, the ...
Be glad they don’t have coffee-tables in the Tube, métro, subway and U-Bahn, otherwise you wouldn’t have any excuse not to take this book with you on your subterranean peripatations. ‘Transit Maps of the World’ is an expansion of the earlier ‘Metro Maps of the World’ and was published at the end ...
In October 2002, a dramatic find exploded onto the scene in the field of Biblical archaeology. At a Washington press conference, Hershel Shanks, editor and publisher of the Biblical Archaeology Review, presented a large audience with what he called "the first ever archaeological discovery to ...
They did a lot of crazy stuff in the Sixties, man. Especially at universities like Berkeley, a hotbed of political radicalism, of experiments with free love and cheap drugs (or was that cheap love and free drugs?) and of… map reviews. This is the verbatim text of such a review from the Berkely ...