According to a Brisbane survey we did some time back, ‘two thirds of the Aussie public still want to increase our overseas aid to countries that are poor, have poor social services, poor health standards or who are suffering from a natural disaster or post-conflict trauma’. I undertook the in-depth survey of 140 people in [...]

By Stephen Marche May 2012 SOCIAL MEDIA—FROM FACEBOOK TO TWITTER—HAVE MADE US MORE DENSELY NETWORKED THAN EVER. YET FOR ALL THIS CONNECTIVITY, NEW RESEARCH SUGGESTS THAT WE HAVE NEVER BEEN LONELIER (OR MORE NARCISSISTIC)—AND THAT THIS LONELINESS IS MAKING US MENTALLY AND PHYSICALLY ILL. A REPORT ON WHAT THE EPIDEMIC OF LONELINESS IS DOING TO OUR [...]

Maybe, as novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested, the rich really are different. They’re more likely to behave badly, according to seven experiments that weighed the ethics of hundreds of people. The “upper class,” as defined by the study, were more likely to break the law while driving, take sweets from children, lie in negotiation, cheat [...]

April 9, 2012 Most churchgoers see no great conflict between their beliefs and life in a market economy such as ours. But proponents of the little-known ”sabbath economics” argue Christ’s teachings have been reinterpreted over the centuries to make them fit with modern capitalism. All I know about sabbath economics comes from the little book, [...]

Lisa Schirch Posted: 03/10/2012 8:45 am   Echoes of victims call out to us over television or even twitter with bloodied images of civilians suffering. Those with empathy want to stop it. There is vast appeal for a fast fantasy of firepower solution. I sing along with Canadian Bruce Cockburn’s song “If I had a [...]

Former FBI agent Ali Soufan successfully interrogated captured Islamist terrorists after 9/11 without resorting to “enhanced’ techniques. In a SPIEGEL interview, he revealed how he got jihadists to talk using tea and trucker magazines and explained how 9/11 could have been prevented… Most of the people who went to Iraq to fight against us in [...]

  Virginia Tilley   14 December 2011   The Archbishop of Canterbury has warned that the Arab Spring is 
threatening the safety of Christian communities in the Middle East.[1] He 
did not realise it, but this public warning—much as President Obama’s UN 
speech in September[2] struck the death knell for US credibility in the 
Middle [...]

By Chris Hedges, December 06, 2011 “Truth Dig” -  Chris Hedges gave an abbreviated version of this talk Saturday morning in Liberty Square in New York City as part of an appeal to Trinity Church to turn over to the Occupy Wall Street movement an empty lot, known as Duarte Square, that the church owns at Canal Street [...]

NOVEMBER 1, 2011, 9:15 PM How to Feed the Hungry, Faster By TINA ROSENBERG  On Friday, I wrote about how people in Dhobley, Somalia, are getting emergency food despite a guerrilla war that is keeping out aid workers ― and food.  Instead of trucking in sacks of food, World Concern and its partner, the African Rescue Committee, distribute  vouchers that people in [...]

OCTOBER 27, 2011, 9:35 PM In Famine, Vouchers Can Be Tickets to Survival By TINA ROSENBERG The town of Dhobley, Somalia, sits at the gateway of hell.  Just west of Dhobley is the border with Kenya, and the road to Dadaab, which hosts a giant complex of refugee camps; Dhobley has become the last stop in Somalia [...]

American civilians killed in 9/11: 2,977 Afghan civilians killed in the War On Terror over 8,800 Iraqi civilians killed in the War On Terror estimates range from over 150,000 (WHO) to over 650,000 (The Lancet) to over 1.1 million (IIACSS/ORB) to as high as 1.45 million (extrapolation) The Lancet’s estimate 2.5% of the country’s population [...]

Simon Smart September 9, 2011 I’m getting ready to duck, but don’t shoot the messenger. The results are in: religious people are nicer. Or so says Robert Putnam, professor of public policy at Harvard. Described by London’s Sunday Times as the most influential academic in the world today, Putnam is not a religious believer. Best [...]