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From ChristianToday, a note on the release of the Poverty and Justice Bible (from the American Bible Society)
The headline, oddly, is "Americans more likely to credit Obama for verse on justice than Bible," which suggests a kind of conservative-Christian disdain for the supposed popular tendency to lionize Obama as a populist champion. The piece highlights a Harris Interactive survey that presented respondents with the quotation, "You must defend those who are helpless and have no hope. Be fair and give justice to the poor and homeless," and asked its source. The answers given were Obama (16%), the Bible (13%), the Dalai Lama (9%), MLK (8%), Oprah (4%) and Bono (3%). (It's Proverbs 31.8f.) I have to wonder about methodology. I assume this was a multiple choice question, and without a list of choices I'm sure 95% of respondents would have answered "I don't know." The choices listed by the article only add up to 53%. Anyhow, it's interesting.
Bright-Sided: The Negative Consequences Of Positive Thinking - Bright-sided - Jezebel
I love Barbara Ehrenreich, and this is a great review of her most recent book. I'd like to do a post on this myself.
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Ehrenreich also writes persuasively that the popularity of positive thinking in corporate America — she cites the rise of "self-described management gurus" like Tony Robbins and the book Who Moved My Cheese? as examples — has served to blind workers to their ever-decreasing job security.
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By and large, America's white-collar corporate workforce drank the Kool-Aid, as the expression goes, and accepted positive thinking as a substitute for their former affluence and security. They did not take to the streets, shift their political allegiance in large numbers, or show up at work with automatic weapons in hand. As one laid-off executive told me with quiet pride, "I've gotten over my negative feelings, which were so dysfunctional." Positive thinking promised them a sense of control in a world where the "cheese" was always moving. They may have had less and less power to chart their own futures, but they had been given a worldview — a belief system, almost a religion — that claimed they were in fact infinitely powerful, if they could only master their own minds.
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The Grapes of Wrath revisited: a modern-day road trip through John Steinbeck's fiction to Barack Obama's reality | World news | guardian.co.uk
From the article: "Much of Good Samaritan's work is funded by hospitals trying to keep patients who cannot pay out of emergency rooms, where they must be treated for any immediate health crisis by law whether they can pay or not. Those same hospitals have an interest in promoting charity as an alternative to President Obama's plans for government to take the lead in getting healthcare to the poor and the middle classes likely to be bankrupted by catastrophic illness. Good Samaritan makes no secret of where it stands on the issue -- the government has no business involving itself in healthcare." Thanks to Mel M.
Professor X, "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower," The Atlantic Online (June 2009)
Iterasi: sqrl.it/?v6ahs
Webcite: webcitation.org/5j8QjFyCZ
Afghanistan: Law Curbing Women’s Rights Takes Effect | Human Rights Watch (August 13, 2009)
"The law gives a husband the right to withdraw basic maintenance from his wife, including food, if she refuses to obey his sexual demands. It grants guardianship of children exclusively to their fathers and grandfathers. It requires women to get permission from their husbands to work. It also effectively allows a rapist to avoid prosecution by paying 'blood money' to a girl who was injured when he raped her."
"Caritas in veritate" - Encyclical Letter of His Holiness Benedict XVI
An English version of the original. "Profit is useful if it serves as a means towards an end that provides a sense both of how to produce it and how to make good use of it. Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty."
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Profit is useful if it serves as a means towards an
end that provides a sense both of how to produce it and how to make good use of
it. Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means
and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and
creating poverty.
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