The attempted assassination of Congresswoman Giffords and the murder of so many others in Arizona has elicited a number of policy suggestions, from gun control to private protection for elected officials, to banning incitement to violence on websites either directly or more subtly (e.g., Sarah Palin’s putting a bull’s-eye target on Giffords’ congressional district to…

Some African churches have taken a frightening literal turn: accusing children of witchcraft and torturing or killing them to purify their souls.  Over the weekend, the Associated Press reported that more than 15,000 Nigerian children have been accused of being witches in the last decade, with around 1,000 of those children murdered because of the accusation. …

Chris Rock had a great riff in one of his early stand up comedy routines which basically said how he was scared to death of white teenage boys.  This was the time around the Columbine shootings and the joke was funny because it played off of a contradicting mainstream American fear of grown black males, a demographic of…

With yesterday’s shooting at the Holocaust museum, I was reminded of a story told to me several years ago by a professor of when he had been a doctoral student.  An eminent post-modern theologian had come to his university to deliver a lecture on morality.  The guest insisted that morality was completely embedded in culture,…

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