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(These are excerpts—click on the title to view the whole piece!)
Sarah's Laugh, Donald Duck, and Jesus' Other Woman
It was many years after those long afternoons pressed up against the flowery warm scent of my mother's house dresses that I came to realize why almost everyone I've known has little or no familiarity with the Old Testament. I was not surprised when I drew blank stares from Catholics if I reference God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his only son or the trick Jacob played on his brother Esau to cheat him out of his inheritance. I knew the Church only teaches what is in the Gospels, the "Old Testament" being just prophetic prelude to the coming of the Messiah. But it came as a shock when I found that none of the Jews I knew were familiar with those stories, either. The books of the Bible are, after all, their holy writ.
Thomas J. Hubschman
For the last 40 years, we've suffered from an insistent and dangerous political correctness, but it's not about race or gender. For some time, Americans in public life have been forbidden to suggest there's anything wrong with the free market. If you support controlling the cost of insulin, forgiving student loans, paying for infrastructure (more about that to come), you get branded a "socialist" or simply "too radical." Even progressives have to extol the virtues of capitalism, just not unfettered capitalism. Here's the problem: it takes systemic thinking to address something like climate change, and the free market sucks at planning.
Marko Fong
