Wednesday's News & Ideas
Why God hates Haiti
Newsweek: The frustrating theology of suffering.
Religion Dispatches: Haiti and the push for theological questions
Sojourner’s God’s Politics blog: Haiti and the wedding at Cana
Houses of worship still divided by race
Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Pastor John Fichtner of Liberty Church in Marietta has had rare success in diversifying his congregation after he began moving his white church toward a racial mix 13 years ago.
Our executive director is embezzling
Blue Avocado: It's the phone call no board member wants: word that the organization's executive director is being investigated for embezzlement.
Academic and publishing freedom
Inside Higher Ed: Decision to kill article about Wheaton College stirs debate.
2010 Christianity Today book awards
Christianity Today: Judges whittled 472 submissions down to 12 winners.
The Spark
The compassionate instinct
For millennia, we have regarded the emotions as the fount of irrationality, baseness and sin. The idea of the seven deadly sins takes our destructive passions for granted. But recent studies of compassion argue persuasively for a different take on human nature, one that rejects the preeminence of self-interest. These studies support a view of the emotions as rational, functional, and adaptive -- a view which has its origins in Darwin’s Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. Compassion and benevolence, this research suggests, are an evolved part of human nature, rooted in our brain and biology, and ready to be cultivated for the greater good.
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