It has already been successful in other animals: Physicians have severed the spinal cords of one white mouse and one black mouse, switched their heads and produced living mice. Similar surgeries have been successful with dogs and monkeys.
And now there is serious talk of doing a head transplant on a human being.
While the transition from paternalistic “helping” models to more mutual partnership models is in many ways a helpful and important move for the modern church, it is also misguided, theologically shaky, and ultimately incomplete. The church, especially amidst a religious and political climate that spews venomous rhetoric about “the other,” must offer a thoughtful and radical counter-narrative of what it means to live with and for one another.
And partnership simply does not go far enough.
Ahh, America, the land of the free and the home of the badass Olympians.
But the Olympics has also given Americans an opportunity to rear our ugly heads. The Olympics have shown that in America, we aren’t really free. No, in America you have to play by the rules, and if you don’t live up to national expectations, even an Olympian can become America’s next scapegoat.
In a memo announced Thursday, the Justice Department announced it plans to end using private prisons in the United States. As reported in the Washington Post, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates will instruct, “officials to either decline to renew the contracts for private prison operators when they expire or “substantially reduce” the contracts’ scope.”
Images trigger empathy; to perceive tragedy, we need to see the victim. The effect is curiously more profound when we see the image of a single victim: While one death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic. The photo that emerged overnight of a bloodied 5-year-old boy, wounded in an air strike in Aleppo and rescued by the White Helmets, feels hauntingly familiar. It seems to be having the same effect as the first picture to break the heart of the world: that of Aylan Kurdi, a drowned 3-year-old boy lying face-down with his soaked red shirt and blue bottoms. That image, like that of 5-year-old Omran Daqneesh, lies imprinted on our minds. It was a simple photograph with an absolute truth: A kid died and his lifeless body washed up on the shore like a piece of wood or a discarded plastic bottle; at the moment nothing seemed more savage.
Pope Francis met with French President Francois Hollande at the Vatican just three weeks after an elderly priest was brutally murdered by Islamist militants in northern France.
The Vatican said the meeting on Wednesday was private and released no further details of what was discussed.
For the nation’s 50 million public school students, another school year is about to begin. Are they ready? Even if they get new backpacks, notebooks, and pencils, most of our students are not prepared to do the schoolwork expected of them.
Two out of three American eighth graders can neither read nor do math at grade level. Schools serving low-income communities perform particularly poorly on a whole range of measurable outcomes including language, reading, and mathematics — critical skills for performing well and succeeding in society.
Two years after Devon Simmons was released from prison, he completed his associate degree — following through on the educational start he got at Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville, N.Y. And Simmons is not stopping there: He plans next to pursue a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice at the John Jay College of the City University of New York.
It all started in 2012, when, while still serving a 15-year sentence, Simmons applied for the Prison-to-College Pipeline, an initiative at CUNY that provides access to higher education for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. After Simmons took a CUNY admissions test, interviewed, and submitted essays, he was selected to take classes taught by CUNY faculty at Otisville Correctional Facility, a medium-security federal facility for male inmates.
If I’m completely honest, I’ve been really discouraged as of late. A major source of my discouragement has been the way the American evangelical church (a tribe I have identified with for most of my life, so my critique and exhortation will be directed there) has chosen to engage the world in this season marked by division, violence, and trauma. Now, I admit I’m speaking in generalities, but rather than being the healing balm to society’s gaping wounds, we have often contributed to the bleeding by either withdrawing in fear or adding fuel to the violence.
Thinking of jumping in your car and driving to Louisiana to help those affected by the flood? Wondering how you could mail some food or hand-me-down clothes to help? If you answered yes — don’t do it.
Yet, that is.