Crows, scientists say, are as smart as the typical five-to-seven year-old. Any comment about the “intelligence” any kind of “life” has or does not have is immediately problematic–and human-centric. The more we learn about other forms of life, the more… Read More ›
I read James Emery White’s The Rise of the Nones: Understanding and Reaching the Religiously Unaffiliated (2014) this morning in preparation for a new specific topics course I am teaching this spring–Atheists, Other “Heathens,” and 20th C. United States. White writes from the… Read More ›
GOP politician Michele Bachmann recently commented: …You know the remarkable thing–when you read the Bible, every archeology find that’s ever come forward has only proved the authenticity of the Bible… Such a statement is both interesting and very problematic because Bachmann’s… Read More ›
This serves as a kind of followup to this post where I described an experiment I did with a group of students. I recently did a similar version of this experiment but with some modifications based on suggestions I received… Read More ›
Last night I finished reading Norman Ohler’s fascinating and best-selling Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich (2017, translated by Shaun Whiteside). Ohler describes the relationships between Adolf Hitler and drugs, Nazi soldiers and drugs, and German society and drugs. In addition,… Read More ›
Rhetoric always matters. Just days after scientists (science is real!) announced that a trillion ton glacier broke off of Antarctica, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg made this calculated post: From a perspective of intertextuality, it’s only real purpose can be to falsely… Read More ›
People increasingly attempt to use biological determinism (or essentialism) to lock people into identities, identities that are actually assigned and determined by cultural mores. While people who are transgender or transexual (often abbreviated as just trans) are increasingly accepted by… Read More ›
