The prosperity gospel tries to solve the riddle of human suffering. It is an explanation for the problem of evil. It provides an answer to the question: Why me?
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The prosperity gospel has taken a religion based on the contemplation of a dying man and stripped it of its call to surrender all. Perhaps worse, it has replaced Christian faith with the most painful forms of certainty. The movement has perfected a rarefied form of America's addiction to self-rule, which denies much of our humanity: our fragile bodies, our finitude, our need to stare down our deaths (at least once in a while) and be filled with dread and wonder.
A redwood tree called El Palo Alto has long served as the 120-foot-tall symbol of Palo Alto, but a project to help it thrive has been delayed.
We are still roughly seven million jobs down from prepandemic levels of employment, unemployment among Black and Hispanic workers remains distressingly high, and millions have yet to return to the labor force. But if policymakers hold steady, we are also on the verge of creating a foundation for a more inclusive, resilient recovery — much more robust than what we experienced after the Great Recession, despite having suffered a much bigger jobs hit.
The gene editor CRISPR excels at fixing disease mutations in lab-grown cells. But using CRISPR to treat most people with genetic disorders requires clearing an enormous hurdle: getting the molecular scissors into the body and having it slice DNA in the tissues where it's needed. Now, in a medical first, researchers have injected a CRISPR drug into the blood of people born with a disease that causes fatal nerve and heart disease and shown that in three of them it nearly shut off production of toxic protein by their livers.
An email has been going around the internet as a part of a release of documents related to Apple's App Store-based suit brought by Epic Games. I love this email for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that you can extrapolate from it the very reasons Apple has remained such a vital force in the industry for the past decade.
It really is an exemplary piece of communication.
Journalists and activists talk a lot about how Congress is hopelessly gridlocked and unable to get anything done. And to an extent, it's true. [...]
But it's interesting to note that the sense of gridlock derives in part from the fact that something like the stalled political reform bill has attracted dramatically more media attention than something like the Drinking Water and Wastewater Infrastructure Act of 2021, which passed in May and appropriated $175 billion over five years to upgrade public water systems across the country. [...]. Do you think it's weird that legislation making Juneteenth into a national holiday passed last week with seemingly no warning?
The Secret Congress hypothesis is that this is not a coincidence. Congress takes bipartisan action not despite a lack of public attention, but because of it.
So excited to see Fluid components appear in more and more places. It's really amazing to use them for meeting agendas and notes.
(via Microsoft's new Fluid Office documents are coming to life in Teams, OneNote, and more - The Verge)
Prayer is an act of faith that God is love, that I am needy, and that by turning toward love I will someday, somehow be given a way to participate in the restoration of the good world God made.— Amy Julia Becker
The U.S. Constitution offers very broad protections for freedom of speech. While criticizing the government, or even waving the wrong flag, could get you imprisoned in any territory under Chinese rule, your right to freedom of expression is sacrosanct under the First Amendment—until you step into your place of work, that is. While the government is not entitled to punish political dissent, in most parts of America it is perfectly legal for your boss to fire you if they happen to dislike the person you voted for in the last election.
I'm convinced that reform to "at-will" employment contracts is definitely something that should be discussed, debated, and experimented with further.