Recent MIT research into an internal Facebook report unveiled that of Facebook’s top twenty Christian pages, 19 out of 20 were run by troll farms in Kosovo and Macedonia–likely the same Russian-backed “trolls” responsible for the 2016 election. The largest of those Christian Facebook pages, twenty times larger than the next, had a reach of […]
Tag: democracy
One Year, Alive.
I told myself after a year of “quarantine,” of “surviving” a pandemic, after documenting the months and months of it, that it was only fitting to make sure, one year on, that I would document that too. It’s like a rite of passage, is it not? All the loss and all of the loneliness and […]
Charged with Terrorism for Speaking Truth to Power
One of my colleagues has been named a terrorist by the Egyptian government. Authoritarian regimes, it turns out, don’t like it when human rights organizations criticize their efforts to quell dissent. For now, my colleague is safe, as he lives in the United States, yet in retaliation, Egypt has jailed and tortured his cousin and […]
Complicit Theologies: the Status Quo Church
I’m saddened and appalled by all that has happened at the Capitol, even more so by what I expect in the coming days and weeks will be horrific revelations that it’s much worse than we currently realize as evidence is already mounting to suggest as much. Saddened, appalled, yes–not shocked. Now comes the harder part: […]
The Mass Radicalization of the American Populace
Born in Nashville and having lived there for several years, I’ve been following the recent bombing very closely. The two blocks that were bombed look more like a street in downtown Aleppo than music city. Some of our family as far south as Murfreesboro could not make contact during Christmas and for forty-eight hours afterward […]
The Formation of Paramilitary Forces within the United States
Much has been written about the recent rise of authoritarian power here in the “free world,” but when we live it day-in and day-out, it’s also easy to dismiss these claims as alarmist. That’s fair on some level; we live in a world where every “memetic” moment is driven by some degree of hyperbole, and […]
The End of Democracy
It was my third grade homeroom teacher in Tennessee who spoke about the great melting pot or salad mixer. Or maybe the Cub Scout trip to the local courtroom for a civics lesson toward a merit badge to see the judicial branch at work. It was my Sunday school teacher taking her confirmation class to […]
Reflections on a Holiday
When I was a kid, our family vacations were almost always to the Florida panhandle. That seemed to be pretty common among West Tennessee families, since it was just a one-day drive to the beach. One summer, though, we went north – the only vacation we ever took that wasn’t to Florida. It was the […]
Education is Power
When I was attending Wabash College several years ago, there was a visiting professor in Political Science named John Agresto who actually left the college in 2003 after receiving a call from President Bush asking that he come to Iraq to serve as the “Senior Advisor to the Ministry of Education.” Agresto left America a staunch […]
