Dr Eric Bagamizi visits a patient at Rwinkwavu Hospital in south-east Rwanda. Rwandans pay only $2 a year for health insurance.Photograph: William Campbell/Corbis T wenty-five hundred years ago, the young Gautama Buddha left his princely home, in the foothills of the Himalayas, in a state of…

Australian Politics Political left There is no Left A figment of the Right's imagination In July, incoming senator James McGrath became the latest Liberal Party politician to accuse the ABC of bias. “While it continues to represent only inner-city leftist views, and funded by our taxes, it is in…

One of our editors, Micky Jones, had a chance to interview Walter Brueggemann about Ferguson and the place of protest and prophecy in our faith. MJ: Theologian Dr. Emilie Townes talks about “communal lament” as part of addressing injustice and eventual healing. What, as you see it, is the Old…

Last waltz … Judy Murray in the Strictly dance-off with her professional partner Anton du Beke. Photograph: Guy Levy/PA S ometimes an idea just gets out there. So twice in the last few weeks two distinct groups of friends have suggested to me that I become a contestant on the celebrity TV show…

‘Stories are not stupid. In politics, stories matter.’Photograph: PR E xasperation with politics is a hallmark of the age. But this feeling can take us in different directions. One is to lament the stupidity of everyone around us. The danger in this is alienating ourselves from our fellows, and any…

I teach an undergraduate class on Nietzsche, a philosopher who has a reputation for captivating young minds. After one class, a student came to see me. There was something bothering her. “Is it OK to be changed by reading a philosopher?” she asked. “I mean, do you get inspired by Nietzsche—do you…

Eduardo Pelosi/Flickr Picture a world where human relationships are challenging, narcissism and self-centeredness are on the rise, and there is disagreement on the best way for people to live harmoniously together. It sounds like 21st-century America. But the society that Michael Puett, a tall,…

Radical heritage … David Graeber. Photograph: Frantzesco Kangaris for the Guardian A few years ago David Graeber’s mother had a series of strokes. Social workers advised him that, in order to pay for the home care she needed, he should apply for Medicaid, the US government health insurance programme…

W alter Pitts was used to being bullied. He’d been born into a tough family in Prohibition-era Detroit, where his father, a boiler-maker, had no trouble raising his fists to get his way. The neighborhood boys weren’t much better. One afternoon in 1935, they chased him through the streets until he…

Ruven Afanador F riday, August 30, 2013, the day the feckless Barack Obama brought to a premature end America’s reign as the world’s sole indispensable superpower—or, alternatively, the day the sagacious Barack Obama peered into the Middle Eastern abyss and stepped back from the consuming void—began…

From the era of slavery to the rise of Donald Trump, wealthy elites have relied on the loyalty of poor whites. All Americans deserve better. I’m just a poor white trash motherfucker. No one cares about me. I met the man who said those words while working as a bartender in the Ozark Mountains of…

My daughter, Beatrix, takes violin lessons. She uses a quarter sized violin that has been passed around ious members of my wife’s family for years until they grew to a larger size. We knew, because of its age and use, that it would need a little bit of maintenance after it was passed to her. New…

Illustration by James Graham New research reveals surprising truths about why some work groups thrive and others falter. FEB. 25, 2016 L ike most 25-year-olds, Julia Rozovsky wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life. She had worked at a consulting firm, but it wasn’t a good match. Then she…

Today, a once-distant milestone arrived much sooner than anyone predicted: AlphaGo has defeated Lee Sedol, and computers have conquered Go. The world’s oldest and most intricate board game now joins chess, Jeopardy, and the host of other pursuits that, once exclusive to humans, have become the…

The American media, over the past year, has been trying to work out something of a mystery: Why is the Republican electorate supporting a far-right, orange-toned populist with no real political experience, who espouses extreme and often bizarre views? How has Donald Trump , seemingly out of nowhere,…

In this ongoing series , we ask SF/F authors to describe a specialty in their lives that has nothing (or very little) to do with writing. Join us as we discover what draws authors to their various hobbies, how they fit into their daily lives, and how and they inform the author’s literary identity!…

February 2016 Arts & Letters Double happiness By Convergence and contradiction at the NGV’s ‘Andy Warhol / Ai Weiwei’ Everyone asks: why Andy Warhol and Ai Weiwei? Together? Their works and philosophies seem antithetical: Warhol is the avatar of 20 th -century American capitalism, the inventor of…

“The nature of moral judgments depends on our capacity for paying attention,” Susan Sontag wrote in contemplating our moral responsibility as human beings . This relationship between morality and attention was a primary concern for French philosopher and political activist Simone Weil (February 3,…

FOR SOMEONE WHO HAS BEEN following the career of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben from the beginning — perhaps even including his cameo appearance in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) — his current notoriety as a political thinker might seem surprising and even…

Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a friend forwarded me a post from an obscure email list. The writer had calculated that the continued existence of Afghanistan would delay the Rapture by six months. Millions around the world who would have had a chance of eternal bliss…

Illustration by Paddy Mills Sometime on the morning of 30 August 2012, Shinichi Mochizuki quietly posted four papers on his website. The papers were huge — more than 500 pages in all — packed densely with symbols, and the culmination of more than a decade of solitary work. They also had the…

I have a three hour layover in the San Francisco airport. So… Slippery Slopes and Fixed Ropes Brian Zahnd The “slippery slope” trope is a favorite among fundamentalists. Basically the argument goes like this: The moment you move away from fundamentalist Biblicism you’re on the slippery slope of…

Opinion Why I Use Trigger Warnings Credit Mike McQuade TRIGGER warnings have been getting a lot of pushback lately. Professors who have adopted the practice of alerting their students to potentially disturbing content in a text or class are being accused of coddling millennials. And the students who…

Down the road from my studio, in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, there is a small cafe next door to a tobacconist. Both are owned by Australians of Greek heritage. The week before the people of Greece voted on whether they wished to accept the new round of austerity measures demanded by the Troika…

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Recently, I sat in a circle of students who had just read Eleanor Stump’s chapter on the book of Job in her seminal work on theodicy, Wandering in Darkness . In that chapter, Stump walks the reader through each trying moment of the story, including the conversation between God and Satan that paves…

The following guest post was authored by Josh Parsons, and originally published here on June 19th, 2015. Parsons died on April 11th, 2017 . At the time of this post’s original publication, he was an a

PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview .) ___________ pro-cras-ti-na-tion |prəˌkrastəˈnāSHən, prō-| noun the action of delaying or postponing something: your first tip is to avoid procrastination . Who would have thought that after…

Note: To best understand this post, you should first read Part 1 of Wait But Why’s previous post on procrastination. ___________ PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview .) ___________ Back in high school, if you had asked me if I was a…

There is a curious passage at the beginning of Acts that has been a source of encouragement for me in the face of escalating violence around the world. In Acts chapter 1, Luke the doctor describes Judas' gory death in terrible detail. Surprisingly, this weird little story gives me hope. It seems…

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins Bantam, 406 pp, £20.00, October 2006, ISBN 0 593 05548 9 Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds , and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying…

1. Menstrual cups Many women and girls around the world do not have access to basic sanitary protection -- especially in parts of the developing world where periods are seen as taboo , or where the cost of sanitary pads exceed the average person's income. The menstrual cup is one affordable and…

What is objectionable is the snark, the cattiness, the hissing, the goads and provocations, the infantilism

A year ago, my son Bart announced that he no longer believed in God. He wanted to, he told me, but he just couldn’t. There were too many things going on, from his point of view, which gave evidence of the absence of God. Christianity Today suggested on its blog that if I had raised my son correctly,…

An appreciation of the late, great Marshall Rosenberg The most useful book I’ve ever read — the one I would hand to a newly landed alien, if he had room for only one book in his alien-pouch — happens also to be the most mortifying. It’s a self-help book called Nonviolent Communication , and it’s…

Writer Ijeoma Oluo did something on Martin Luther King Jr. Day I personally avoid at all costs—she engaged a rancid troll on Twitter. The troll, calling himself Dildo Baggins, thought he would get his jollies by being as racist as humanly possible to celebrate MLK Day and Ms. Oluo wasn't going to…

I've spoken at a quite a few churches over the last few years and have had even more conversations with ministers and pastors at churches. Most of these conversations have been about hospitality, about how we can create more welcoming and hospitable faith communities. And over the years I've come to…