Weekend Reads 2/4/17

Silence and Evolution

Too many people believe God’s only actions are miraculous actions. If there are normal, non-miraculous, or scientific explanations for something, then they think God had nothing to do with it. They want to see a burning bush, or they won’t believe God is speaking. They want to prove special, de novo creation or they don’t think God is creating.

I fear these attitudes, which are prevalent among the religious communities I’ve been part of, actually make it more difficult for us to see God at work in the normal circumstances of life, or more pertinently for the origins conversation, in the fossil record or in the genetic code.

Peter's Choice

"Everyone around was poor, including the churches," he wrote, "and charities were nowhere near (this wasn't a city, after all), so more people had to use some sort of government assistance. Taxes went up [as] the help became more widespread."

He was just calling it like he saw it. But it's striking how much a bright, inquisitive, public-spirited guy can take for granted that just is not so.

Covering Politics in a "Post-Truth" America

The media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter. Stories that would have killed any other politician—truly worrisome revelations about everything from the federal taxes Trump dodged to the charitable donations he lied about, the women he insulted and allegedly assaulted, and the mob ties that have long dogged him—did not stop Trump from thriving in this election year. Even fact-checking perhaps the most untruthful candidate of our lifetime didn’t work; the more news outlets did it, the less the facts resonated.

Ohio Was A Bellwether After All

It was fine to point out that Ohio, which is generally somewhat Republican-leaning relative to the country as a whole, wasn’t a must-win state for Clinton. But the article didn’t contemplate the possibility that Clinton’s poor position in Ohio could also portend problems in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which probably were must-wins for her and which, like Ohio, had plenty of white voters without college degrees. In that sense, Ohio could still be a bellwether — a leading indicator of trends elsewhere in the country and the region — even if it wasn’t likely to be the decisive state.