Okay, I admit that I am a big fan of comic superheros. I have been since I was a kid. It is fun to think about what we can do with superpowers. Of course in the comic books the superpowers have to deal with enhanced physical, and sometimes mental, abilities. This gives heros the ability to overpower the “bad guys.” But it is kind of cool to think about intellectual nerd “superpowers.” For example, having the power to induce questions... Read more
by Jerry Park, Joshua Tom, and Brita Andercheck, The following is a re-post in honor of the 50th Anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. Reprinted from Council on Contemporary Families February 2014 Civil Rights Symposium; the full proceedings, including a set of papers focused on religion and relationships, are available here Catholic and Jewish Americans Since The Civil Rights Era The Civil Rights Act of 1964 not only ushered in stronger federal protections for racial and ethnic minorities and women, but also... Read more
I admit that a lot of research in academic journals does not really help the common person. Some of it is political posturing and some of it deals with theoretical or exotic topics that simply will not impact most of us. But every now and then there is a paper that really can help everyone in society. In this case everyone in society is everyone who ever has had to apologize. According to my theological beliefs that is everyone but... Read more
Next year I anticipate having a book out that will look more deeply into the anti-Christian hostility in our society. When it comes out, I will do a blog or three on the findings in that book. But this blog entry will not deal with those findings. Instead, one of the questions I considered as I conducted this research is how the anti-Christian hostility can manifest itself in our society. Then we get Bowdoin College with a near perfect example... Read more
One of my young academic Christian facebook friends recently announced that he was going start a blog, even though he had been warned not to do so. I made a few comments on his page offering him some advice about being a Christian scholar with a blog. Indeed, I got the feeling that he was going to blog on conservative subjects and being a Christian who sometimes writes about subjects not popular with other academics, I hope my advice to... Read more
Stereotypes. We all use them even though we are told not to do so. In some ways our use of stereotypes is understandable. If I have limited knowledge about a person, I may use stereotypes to make guesses about him or her. If the stereotypes are based in reality, then this helps me make a reasonable guess about what that person is like. We stereotype from time to time as a shortcut to make a guess about what someone is... Read more
Originally posted on AAPI Voices May 22, 2014 Keeping (and Losing) Faith, the Asian American Way Read more
In the past few years, a number of different empirical studies have come out highlighting how well women are represented in leadership across a variety of sectors (for example, the 2009 White House Project Report: Benchmarking Women’s Leadership and the 2013 follow-up Benchmarking Women’s Leadership report from Colorado Women’s College). These studies look at a plethora of fields to assess how well women are represented in the highest levels of leadership across sectors. While these studies are quite impressive in their... Read more
Donald Sterling is a pig. That is clearly not a controversial statement given all that we have learned of the displaced Clipper owner over the past month or so. It is not just the racist statements we recently learned about but it is also his history of potential racism and racial mistreatment. Even beyond that, I find it distasteful the way he paraded his ex-mistress in public. A fifty year marriage evidently meant nothing to him. Perhaps this makes me... Read more
I recently came across an article about a lawsuit based on anti-Christian discrimination. I do not know the details of Brandon Jenkins’ case and am willing to wait to see the details of it before passing judgment on the Community College of Baltimore County. I have stated in an earlier blog that those with anti-Christian bias generally do not discriminate against Christians explicitly due to their faith. I stand by that assertion. Yet I am not convinced that the Jenkins... Read more
Black, White and Gray
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