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: religion
20 Years On and Rethinking Empathy and Reconciliation
I’ve been thinking a lot about an old English teacher, Faye Hardin, who passed away in 2019. She was a tough old bag. Some twenty years ago when I had her my senior year, there were students in my class whose parents and grandparents had her as a teacher. She pushed students harder than most–to […]
R&R in the time of social upheaval
Been on the road a lot lately, which is something I struggle with given that it’s a pandemic, but between N95’s and a vaccine, I’m doing what I can to find the balance I know we’re all seeking. So, between island hoping, West coast adventures, and hiking in the Poconos, the last few weeks have […]
Fear, Loathing, and Love in West Tennessee
My parents are visiting me in Pennsylvania. That’s a good thing, given how long the pandemic took them from me. What came as a surprise, though, now that I’ve bought a house, it seems they decided to bring with them everything I owned from the time I was born. It turns out I was a […]
I Really Hate Fireworks
Listening to the fireworks, I don’t have a whole lot of love for July 4th, and I never have. It’s a holiday that admittedly means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and I have every ounce of respect for that, the grandson of a World War II vet, an Eagle […]
A Theology of Journalism
Before there were “journalists”—even before there was writing—the world’s means of sharing “the news” was an oral and aural experience: stories by the fire intended to describe and explain the human condition; a voice shouting in a crowded marketplace, the agora, what’s come to pass—or what will—if the world continues down the path it’s on; […]
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 […]
Against the ‘Mission Statement’
Couple of years back, I found myself in a heated discussion with the policy guru for the Holy See Mission to the United Nations. A major piece of “legislation” was going before the UN on the status of refugees, and the Church was negotiating protections for those who were fleeing harm. Given Pope Francis’ encyclical, […]
Dissecting the Death Rattle of American Decline
I’ve been critical of “Hillbilly Elegy” and other theories that made the rise of Trump more the result of economic disparity than white supremacy. It’s the same argument that populism is a reaction to a dying Republican party, a “death rattle” as the party becomes smaller and has to resort to extremes to win. The […]
Quarantine, Day 327, Or Cat Theology
Sometimes, when the house is particularly quiet, you can hear Freya’s paws pitter-patter across the hardwood floor, and having never had an indoor cat, there’s something special to me about the way she moves with this persistant grace that always brings me calm and gets me excited at the same time. She’s taken sometimes to […]
