| Are American Catholics Too American for the Pope? |
[22 Sep 2015|09:45am] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/life/faithbased/2015/09/pope_francis_in_america_there_are_three_types_of_u_s_catholics_and_none.html In 1899, Pope Leo XIII issued a papal encyclical, Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae (Witness to Our Good Will), condemning a heresy that he called “Americanism.” Responding to American Catholic leaders who wanted the church to assimilate into American culture by becoming more progressive, he insisted that the church would not “shape her teachings more in accord with the spirit of the age and relax some of her ancient severity and make some concessions to new opinions.” Democracy, the separation of church and state, the trust in individual conscience over church authority—all these were potentially dangerous innovations that the Church refused to countenance. The Catholic Church would not become more “American.”
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| The Other Pill |
[22 Sep 2015|07:11pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/09/abortion_pill_mifepristone_at_15_more_important_and_more_restricted_than.html In the present political climate—in which the House votes to defund Planned Parenthood and some elected representatives would choose a government shutdown over continuing to fund the women’s health care provider—simply maintaining the status quo of reproductive choices might feel like a victory. In that spirit, let’s mark the 15th anniversary of mifepristone, also known as the abortion pill: It has been available in the U.S. for a decade and a half as of next Monday, and no one has managed to take it away yet.
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| Harry Potter and the Mysterious Defeat Device |
[22 Sep 2015|07:52pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/09/volkswagen_s_cheating_emissions_software_and_the_threat_of_black_boxes.html The Environmental Protection Agency should have listened to Ron Weasley’s dad. In the Harry Potter books and films, Arthur Weasley is a bureaucrat in the British magical world’s chief regulatory agency, the Ministry of Magic, where his job is to protect people from dangerous devices. He is known for his unusual fascination with nonmagical technologies, and toward the end of the second book, he delivers a deep lesson in living safely with technology. “What have I always told you? Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.”
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| Scream Queens |
[22 Sep 2015|07:57pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2015/09/scream_queens_by_ryan_murphy_on_fox_starring_emma_roberts_ariana_grande.html Creating a hit TV show is so difficult that the networks keep turning to proven talents for help. The Muppets, John Stamos, Rob Lowe, Limitless, and Minority Report are some of the known, successful quantities that have been asked to re-work their magic this fall. The prolific Ryan Murphy has also been tapped by Fox to once again ply audiences with his trademark products, spiked bubblegum and nutritious venom. But his new show, Scream Queens, a comic-horror anthology show, is not exactly a wholly original series. It’s similar is to his FX show American Horror Story in the way that light brown sugar speckled with grit is to dark brown sugar speckled with slivers of glass and MDMA: same overall taste, less intensity, greatly reduced chance that you’ll experience either agony or ecstasy.
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