New York’s public-school principals have generally felt it their duty to protect, not strain, relations between their schools and the DOE bosses at Tweed. Accordingly, principals have mostly not been among the critics of the system’s growing emphasis on standardized testing. But this year, a small group of them began to speak out. Among the dissidents: Zipporiah Mills of P.S. …
As the calls for Mitt Romney to release his tax returns grow louder, and concerns about his undisclosed millions in offshore accounts increase, I wonder how the presumptive Republican nominee reconciles his great, secret stores of wealth with the principles of his Mormon faith. For Mormonism, as much as conventional Christianity, decries the hoarding of riches. ‘Wo unto the rich,” …
Never mind what the tabloids say. Celebrities are not “just like us.” We don’t have our first date over sushi on a private jet, as Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are rumored to have done, and we don’t appear together publicly for the first time, as they did, in Rome. We don’t have the opportunity to rave about our new …
In their interfaith marriage and divorce, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are ‘just like us’ Read More
New research suggests that more money makes people act less human. Or at least less humane. In a windowless room on the University of California, Berkeley, campus, two undergrads are playing a Monopoly game that one of them has no chance of winning. A team of psychologists has rigged it so that skill, brains, savvy, and luck—those ingredients that ineffably …
At the funeral of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in August 2009, Boston’s Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley pulled President Obama aside for a quiet word. It was a sign of things to come: the first failure of the president to understand the moral dimensions of his health-care proposal. The bill that has become known by its opponents as “Obamacare” had not yet been passed …
With health-care battle not yet over, Obama must reach out to religious leaders Read More
Americans believe there’s too much religion talk in the public sphere, and these days, it’s especially easy to be cynical. Scratch the surface of any passionately held faith-based position between April and November of an election year, and find a political agenda. That’s because issues like gay marriage and religious liberty motivate voters in the right and left base who …
Why are evangelicals supporting immigration reform? Read More
It surprises me a little that the men who run things at the Vatican did not use their most favorite recent pejorative – “feminist” — when they rapped the knuckles of Margaret Farley, a nun who has long been a professor at Yale, for having written a book about sex and love that condones masturbation (and as of Thursday morning was in …
Vatican’s use of term ‘radical feminist’ says more about cardinals than nuns they rebuke Read More
Sikhs don’t make much religion news. They don’t go on TV announcing their intention to burn Korans; they don’t loudly forecast apocalypse; and they have not had to defend their faith as one of them races to be president of the United States. But the Sikh community caught my attention recently with the announcement of its FlyRight app, which, when …
The religious authorities and pundits are wrong: Technology is good for religion Read More
People always ask, “What would Jesus do?,” but in America today, it’s impossible to know. And that’s because there are (at least) two prevailing views of God at work in our public and political conversation. It would not be an exaggeration to say that when you pull the lever this November, you will not just be voting for president. You …
Cornel West is a self-proclaimed prophet who believes in the virtues of love and justice. But in his own life, he can’t seem to find either. In November 2007, Cornel West got onstage at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and before a hollering crowd of more than a thousand people, with much arm-waving and wrist-flapping, along with a certain amount of ass-wagging, …