Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Most on the "religious right" aren't paying attention to rulings like this, but like Charles Rubin they should be: The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has ruled that same-sex couples can take advantage of the estate tax marital deduction provisions of the Internal Revenue Code. This ruling has far-reaching federal …
Continue reading "Same-Sex Civil Marriage: The End of the Marital Estate and Gift Tax Exemption?"
Pollster John Zogby finds young people disillusioned these days: Nearly four years after enthusiastic younger voters poured into polling booths to help push Barack Obama over the finish line and into the Oval Office, their hope has turned to fear and pollster John Zogby says that they are ready to give up on politics. “I …
Continue reading "Generation Y Answers the Question from the Last Presidential Cycle"
Things are not pretty in the Windy City these days: But despite the chorus of praise, it’s becoming evident that the city took a serious turn for the worse during the first decade of the new century. The gleaming towers, swank restaurants, and smart shops remain, but Chicago is experiencing a steep decline quite different …
Continue reading "Chicago: The City of Big Shoulders Slumps"
A few of you will remember my exchange with Russell Earl Kelly on the tithe. Given the way the tithe is generally presented in full-gospel churches, I'm surprised that I haven't gotten a great deal of blowback on my position. That has finally come from one Glendon Hermanus from South Africa, who commented on one …
Continue reading "My Reply to Glendon Hermanus on the Tithe and the Authority of the Church"
A hard conclusion to avoid: In a move that took most people by surprise, the Archbishop of the Anglican Province of Rwanda, the Most Rev. Onesphorus Rwaje publicly handed over a number of US bishops and clergy who had been canonically resident in Rwanda to the Most Rev. Robert Duncan, Archbishop of the Anglican Church …
Continue reading "Turning it Over to the ACNA: The Rwandans Have Had All the Fun They Can Stand"
That's StandFirm's Matt Kennedy for you, reacting to Ridgecrest's dry policy for the upcoming ACNA Provincial Synod: No scotch, no sherry, no cigars? It’s bad enough for the laity and the presbyterate…but the bishops. How shall the bishops endure this deprivation? This may be the first North American Anglican gathering in which the bishops are …
From (where else?) The Lead: The most popular immortality narrative is Soul. Most Christians now believe that their souls, which persist after death, will be reunited with their resurrected bodies. Souls thus solve a lot of the identity problems associated with the earlier Resurrection narrative. Cave argues that Soul narrative resolves the Mortality Paradox by …
This, from A.W. Grabau's 1913 classic Principles of Stratigraphy: The chief agents in retaining the sun's heat within the earth's atmosphere are the carbon dioxide and the water vapor, which act as thermal blankets. It has been estimated by Arrhenius (2) that if the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere were increased 2.5 to 3 …
Continue reading "Carbon Dioxide and Climate Change: An Old View"
There has been a great deal of discussion these days about gender selective abortions, which, when done, usually go against girls. We've been presented stories of nations where the ratio of men to women in the population is rising to "unprecedented" proportions because families are doing away with their baby girls through abortion. And, of …
Continue reading "Abortion, Infanticide and the "War on Women": A Lesson From China"
It isn't Stuxnet or even Flame, but... The malware known as 'Flame,' that was described by the analysts who discovered it as a super-cyberweapon, is actually a tool for cyberespionage that has been running inside Iranian data centers and labs for as long as five years without being discovered or causing significant damage. Contrast that …
Continue reading "The Most Potent Virus on Iranian Computers"
