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'The setting is simple, austere. The workspace occupied by the desk is small. I am impressed not only by the simplicity of the furniture, but also by the objects in the room. The spirituality of Jorge Mario Bergoglio is not made of "harmonized energies," as he would call them, but of human faces: Christ, St. Francis, St. Joseph and Mary.... 'I ask Pope Francis point-blank: "Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?" He...replies: "I ​​do not know what might be the most fitting description.... I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner." ' "...In the history of salvation, God has saved a people. There is no full identity without belonging to a people. No one is saved alone, as an isolated individual, but God attracts us looking at the complex web of relationships that take place in the human community. God enters into this dynamic, this participation in the web of human relationships.... ' "In Buenos Aires I used to receive letters from homosexual persons who are 'socially wounded' because they tell me that they feel like the church has always condemned them. But the church does not want to do this. During the return flight from Rio de Janeiro I said that if a homosexual person is of good will and is in search of God, I am no one to judge.... Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.... ' "The confessional is not a torture chamber, but the place in which the Lord's mercy motivates us to do better. I also consider the situation of a woman with a failed marriage in her past and who also had an abortion. Then this woman remarries, and she is now happy and has five children. That abortion in her past weighs heavily on her conscience and she sincerely regrets it. She would like to move forward in her Christian life. What is the confessor to do? ' "We c

'The setting is simple, austere. The workspace occupied by the desk is small. I am impressed not only by the simplicity of the furniture, but also by the objects in the room. The spirituality of Jorge Mario Bergoglio is not made of "harmonized energies," as he would call them, but of human faces: Christ, St. Francis, St. Joseph and Mary.... 'I ask Pope Francis point-blank: "Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?" He...replies: "I ​​do not know what might be the most fitting description.... I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner." ' "...In the history of salvation, God has saved a people. There is no full identity without belonging to a people. No one is saved alone, as an isolated individual, but God attracts us looking at the complex web of relationships that take place in the human community. God enters into this dynamic, this participation in the web of human relationships.... ' "In Buenos Aires I used to receive letters from homosexual persons who are 'socially wounded' because they tell me that they feel like the church has always condemned them. But the church does not want to do this. During the return flight from Rio de Janeiro I said that if a homosexual person is of good will and is in search of God, I am no one to judge.... Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.... ' "The confessional is not a torture chamber, but the place in which the Lord's mercy motivates us to do better. I also consider the situation of a woman with a failed marriage in her past and who also had an abortion. Then this woman remarries, and she is now happy and has five children. That abortion in her past weighs heavily on her conscience and she sincerely regrets it. She would like to move forward in her Christian life. What is the confessor to do? ' "W

"I urged that we be realistic about reasoning and recognize that reasons persuade others on moral and political issues only under very special circumstances. "Reason is far less powerful than intuition, so if you're arguing (or deliberating) with a partner who lives on the other side of the political spectrum from you, and you approach issues such as abortion, gay marriage or income inequality with powerfully different intuitive reactions, you are unlikely to effect any persuasion no matter how good your arguments and no matter how much time you give your opponent to reflect upon your logic. "I never said that reasons were irrelevant. I said that they were no match for intuition, and that they were usually a servant of one's own intuitions. Therefore, if you want to persuade someone, talk to the elephant first."

'Haidt's lone hero among the great philosophers - David Hume - points out, there is a logical gap between what is done (descriptive ethics) and what ought to be done (normative ethics). Haidt acknowledges that his concern as a psychologist is overwhelmingly descriptive. But he says almost nothing about how to connect his work with the compelling normative questions of human life. Engaging with the extensive philosophical discussions of Hume's distinction between "is" and "ought" could help fill this major gap in Haidt's account of ethics.'

"The existing evidence does not support the conclusion that free will is an illusion. First of all, it does not show that a decision has been made before people are aware of having made it. It simply finds discernible patterns of neural activity that precede decisions. If we assume that conscious decisions have neural correlates, then we should expect to find early signs of those correlates "ramping up" to the moment of consciousness. It would be miraculous if the brain did nothing at all until the moment when people became aware of a decision to move. These experiments all involve quick, repetitive decisions, and people are told not to plan their decisions but just to wait for an urge to come upon them. The early neural activity measured in the experiments likely represents these urges or other preparations for movement that precede conscious awareness. "This is what we should expect with simple decisions. Indeed, we are lucky that conscious thinking plays little or no role in quick or habitual decisions and actions. If we had to consciously consider our every move, we'd be bumbling fools."

"Rational deliberation is not a switch to be thrown on or off. It is a process, and therefore many of its effects would have to be measured over time. Tellingly, the participants in Haidt's original harmless taboo studies study had little time to deliberate. But as other studies have suggested when people are given more time to reflect, they can change their beliefs to fit the evidence, even when those beliefs might be initially emotionally uncomfortable to them. "To engage in democratic politics means seeing your fellow citizens as equal autonomous agents capable of making up their own minds. And that means that in a functioning democracy, we owe one another reasons for our political actions. "Giving up on the idea that reason matters is not only premature from a scientific point of view; it throws in the towel on an essential democratic hope. Politics needn't always be war by other means; democracies can, and should be places where the exchange of reasons is encouraged. This hope is not a delusion; it is an ideal - and in our countdown to November, one still worth striving for."

Dostoevsky's great virtue as a writer is to be so utterly convincing in outlining what he doesn't believe and so deeply unconvincing in defending what he wants to believe. As Blake said of "Paradise Lost," Satan gets all the best lines. The story of the Grand Inquisitor places a stark choice in front of us: demonic happiness or unbearable freedom? And this choice conceals another, deeper one: truth or falsehood? The truth that sets free is not, as we saw, the freedom of inclination and passing desire. It is the freedom of faith. It is the acceptance - submission, even - to a demand that both places a perhaps intolerable burden on the self, but which also energizes a movement of subjective conversion, to begin again. In disobeying ourselves and obeying this hard command, we may put on new selves. Faith hopes for grace.

'Last week, at a hearing before the Senate Budget Committee, Kent Conrad, the chairman of that committee, laid out the issue as many Americans see it: "The growing gap between the very wealthy and everyone else has serious ramifications for the country. It hinders economic growth, it undermines confidence in our institutions, and it goes against one of the core ideals of this country - that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can succeed and leave a better future for your kids and your grandkids."

As the wording of the amendment evolved during the Congressional debate, the principle of the debt's inviolability became a general proposition, applicable not just to the Civil War debt but to all future accrued debts of the United States. The Republican Senate leader, Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio, declared that by placing the debt "under the guardianship of the Constitution," investors would be spared from being "subject to the varying majorities which may arise in Congress." Two years later, on the verge of the amendment's ratification, its champions inside the Republican Party made their intentions absolutely clear, proclaiming in their 1868 party platform that "national honor requires the payment of the public indebtedness in the utmost good faith to all creditors at home and abroad," and pronouncing any repudiation of the debt "a national crime." More than three generations later, in 1935, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, ruling in the case of Perry v. the United States, revisited the amendment and affirmed the "fundamental principle" that Congress may not "alter or destroy" debts already incurred. As the wording of the amendment evolved during the Congressional debate, the principle of the debt's inviolability became a general proposition, applicable not just to the Civil War debt but to all future accrued debts of the United States. The Republican Senate leader, Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio, declared that by placing the debt "under the guardianship of the Constitution," investors would be spared from being "subject to the varying majorities which may arise in Congress." Two years later, on the verge of the amendment's ratification, its champions inside the Republican Party made their intentions absolutely clear, proclaiming in their 1868 party platform that "national honor requires the payment of the public indebtedness in the utmost good faith to all creditors at home and abroad," and pronouncing any repu

I realize now that my prejudices against conservatives were, in many ways, just as uncompromising as the prejudices I'd often projected onto them. They were just people. Not issues. Not votes. People whose daughters go to school with my daughters, whose dogs run away and come back and run away again, whose hands found my shoulders and who didn't judge, the night I wept over a friend who had taken her own life.

letters by Daniel Dennett, Judith Shapiro & others (incl F.Smith) pro & con & in between

Agrees with Obama's 7/22/09 analysis of need to overhaul health care system - compassion coincides with need for cost constraint.

Conservative criticism of Republican scare tactics about Medicare limiting futile care at EOL

Swiss private & universal health care

'"Contamination" ... is an evocative term. When people speak for an ideal of cultural purity, sustaining the authentic culture of the Asante or the American family farm, I find myself drawn to contamination as the name for a counterideal. [The Roman playwright] Terence [whose plays acquired that label to describe his conflation of Greek plays into a single Roman comedy] had a notably firm grasp on the range of human variety: "So many men, so many opinions" was a line of his. And it's in his comedy "The Self-Tormentor" that you'll find what may be the golden rule of cosmopolitanism - Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto; "I am human: nothing human is alien to me." The context is illuminating. A busybody farmer named Chremes is told by his neighbor to mind his own affairs; the homo sum credo is Chremes's breezy rejoinder. It isn't meant to be an ordinance from on high; it's just the case for gossip. Then again, gossip - the fascination people have for the small doings of other people - has been a powerful force for conversation among cultures. 'The ideal of contamination has few exponents more eloquent than Salman Rushdie, who has insisted that the novel that occasioned his fatwa "celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotch-potch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world." No doubt there can be an easy and spurious utopianism of "mixture," as there is of "purity" or "authenticity." And yet the larger human truth is on the side of contamination - that endless process of imitation and revision. 'A tenable global ethics has to temper a respect for difference with a respect for the freedom of actual human beings to make their own choices. That's why cosmopolitans don't insist that everyone become cosmopolitan. They know they don't hav

Most people in health care understand and accept the need for clinical hierarchies. The problem is that we aren't usually prepared for them; nor are we given protocols for resolving the inevitable tensions that arise over appropriate care. Doctors and nurses are trained differently, and our sense of priorities can conflict. When that happens, the lack of an established, neutral way of resolving such clashes works to everyone's detriment. This isn't about hurt feelings or bruised egos. Modern health care is complex, highly technical and dangerous, and the lack of flexible, dynamic protocols to facilitate communication along the medical hierarchy can be deadly. Indeed, preventable medical errors kill 100,000 patients a year, or a million people a decade, wrote Rosemary Gordon and Janardan Prasad Singh in their book "Wall of Silence."

Easter is the traditional time for Christians to reaffirm their faith. I want to show that we can do this without renouncing reason. ..."Sources of the self" are the sources nurturing the values that define an individual's life. For me, there are two such sources. One is the Enlightenment, where I'm particularly inspired by Voltaire, Hume and the founders of the American republic. The other is the Catholic Church, in which I was baptized..., ...educated for 8 years ... by Ursuline nuns and for 12 more years by Jesuits. For me to deny either of these sources would be to deny something central to my moral being. ...The Catholic philosophical and theological tradition is a fruitful context for pursuing fundamental truth, but only if it is combined with the best available secular thought. ...These three convictions do not include the belief that the specific teachings of the Catholic Church provide the fundamental truths of human life. What I do believe is that these teachings are very helpful for understanding the human condition. Of course, I can already hear the obvious objection: "What you believe isn't Catholicism - it is a diluted concoction that might satisfy ultra-liberal Protestants or Unitarians, but is nothing like the robust tonic of orthodox Catholic doctrine. My answer is that Catholicism too has reconciled itself to the Enlightenment view of religion.

Until very recently, technology had a clear, if boring, purpose: by taking care of the Little Things, it enabled us, its human masters, to focus on the Big Things. "Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible," proclaimed that noted connoisseur of contemplation Oscar Wilde. Fortunately, he added a charming clarification: "Human slavery is wrong, insecure and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends." ...Alas, most designers, following Wilde, think of technologies as nothing more than mechanical slaves that must maximize efficiency. But some are realizing that technologies don't have to be just trivial problem-solvers: they can also be subversive troublemakers, making us question our habits and received ideas. Recently, designers in Germany built devices - "transformational products," they call them - that engage users in "conversations without words." My favorite is a caterpillar-shaped extension cord. If any of the devices plugged into it are left in standby mode, the "caterpillar" starts twisting as if it were in pain. Does it do what normal extension cords do? Yes. But it also awakens users to the fact that the cord is simply the endpoint of a complex socio-technical system with its own politics and ethics. Before, designers have tried to conceal that system. In the future, designers will be obliged to make it visible. While devices-as-problem-solvers seek to avoid friction, devices-as-troublemakers seek to create an "aesthetic of friction" that engages users in new ways. Will such extra seconds of thought - nay, contemplation - slow down civilization? They well might. But who said that stopping to catch a breath on our way to the abyss is not a sensible strategy?