Tech changes out-pace spiritual foundations for their ethical use. Tech changes affect three areas. Individuals acquire greater independence and reach. The locus of power shifts accordingly. And traditional buffers between discordant groups dissolve. These developments…
Religion and interfaith often are seen as limited to their own, quaint little corner in human affairs. But understanding the the mission of religion to express moral positions on political, and even military questions, shows…
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“Tell me how this ends,” asked General David Petraeus in 2003. He was speaking of the war in Iraq, which was born out of faulty intelligence and faultier strategic logic, and spiraled rapidly out of control. Today we know the answer to Petraeus’s question: The war ended with tenuous stability for Iraq — won at the price of some 4,500 dead Americans, an unknown but much higher number of dead Iraqis, roughly a trillion dollars in direct costs, and incalculable damage to the United States’ global reputation. By 2012, two-thirds of Americans were convinced the war in Iraq hadn’t been worth it.
But Petraeus might just as well have asked his famous question of a different war — not the war in Iraq, which he’s often credited with salvaging, or even the war in Afghanistan, which he later struggled to turn around, but the covert drone war over which he presided during his brief tenure as director of the CIA.
The drone war is a shadow war, widely reported in the media but officially unacknowledged by the CIA and the White House. Many details remain obscure, but we know that the United States has engaged in “targeted killings” in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, and possibly in Mali and the Philippines as well. The killings — most reportedly carried out by strikes from unmanned aerial vehicles — have targeted suspected Taliban leaders and terrorists, some identified by name and some targeted as a result of a suspicious pattern of activities. Since the strikes are rarely acknowledged, no one knows precisely how many casualties our shadow war has caused, but media and NGO reports suggest that the number of deaths is somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000.
This article appears in IRFWP.org What is the relationship between the sacred and popular and secular culture and media? Tradtionally, entries on the IRFWP site are devoted to advance and propogate positions supporting greater respect…
An elderly carpenter was ready to retire. He told his employer-contractor of his plans to leave the house-building business to live a more leisurely life with his wife and enjoy his extended family. He would…
This article critiques new directions for the US government agency USAID guided by Hillary Clinton’s State Department and the Obama administration. In director Rajiv Shah’s recent policy speech, he indicates that the mission of genuine…
A good New York Times article by Meg Jay Cohabitation in the United States has increased by more than 1,500 percent in the past half century. In 1960, about 450,000 unmarried couples lived together. Now the…
This article examines the ideal of mutual respect, even appreciation among believers and people of conscience Lent is a widely practiced time of reflection, repentance and renewal. Yet some Christians believe its observance is wrong.…
The post enlightenment era fractured the sacred monolith in the Western worldview and social development. There emerged what some hold to be “purely secular” sectors of enterprise. Void of sacred roots, from where will these sectors gain their ethical and moral guidelines? This is the question we face. What are the points of interface for the sacred and the secular once the assumption of shared space is broken.
In this New York Times article, Nuns who won’t stop nudging we read of a true modern effort to guide corporate behavior by people who live under spiritual vows. The relationships seen here between profit seekers and champions of spiritual life, and social justice provides an encouraging model not just for economic behavior but for other secular enterprise as well.
Long before Occupy Wall Street, the Sisters of St. Francis were quietly staging an occupation of their own. In recent years, this Roman Catholic order of 540 or so nuns has become one of the most surprising groups of corporate activists around.
The nuns have gone toe-to-toe with Kroger, the grocery store chain, over farm worker rights; with McDonald’s, over childhood obesity; and with Wells Fargo, over lending practices. They have tried, with mixed success, to exert some moral suasion over Fortune 500 executives, a group not always known for its piety.
Currently I am involved in a project to do with with the development of a memoir. In the work I am led to research on memoir as an art form and as a literary architecture.
Of course the genre is the art of “talking about myself.” In my research among reviewers I stumbled across some helpful criticism regarding the current phenomenon of self-absorption as a current trend in society.
Here is a piece in the NYTimes that shows how far we’ve come in the social dysfunction that fails to know the the disorder of self obsessed writing. 
The Times writer sticks to the bane on literature, but it is a helpful jumping off point to ponder how much else, from the academy to politics, sport, economy and more are become socially harmful as a result of this trend:
A moment of silence, please, for the lost art of shutting up.
There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occurrences into a snapshot of a broader historical moment. Anyone who didn’t fit one of those categories was obliged to keep quiet. Unremarkable lives went unremarked upon, the way God intended.