“Yet, today, what seems most poignant about this story of just a few years ago is not so much that the young man had the opportunity to meet his friend in person as that meeting face-to-face was still considered an essential requirement by either him or his community—the consummation, if you like, of their friendship.”
“So, we have been living in two pandemics, but only one has dominated our public health discussions.”
“Amid the memes and rhetoric, there has been much in the way of propaganda, unverifiable information, and outright lies that seem, at times, not to be appreciated for what they are.”
“Every generation, we need to learn and relearn how thin the line can be between having a basically liberal society and a basically authoritarian society.”
“And we very much do need to start telling ourselves and these street people the hard (but ultimately more humanizing and compassionate) truth again: We need to call the bums by their rightful name.”
“To challenge Dr. Fauci is, thus, to challenge a kind of revealed truth. Those who question Dr. Fauci are not merely expressing differing opinions; rather, they are apostates, ‘science deniers,’ ‘anti-vaxxers’ spreading dangerous ‘misinformation,’ and they are worthy of ridicule, censorship, and, of course, cancellation.”
“Only days before Goldberg made her ill-informed comments, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) changed its definition of racism to ‘The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.'”
“When I was imprisoned in Iran, I made it clear to the Swiss ambassador to let the Trump administration know not to offer any money in exchange for my release.”
“The implication is that culture and politics can be thought of as the bob of a pendulum swinging back and forth mechanically between the political left and the right, and that, at the moment, we are simply at the leftward amplitude of such a process.”
“You have to have a steel spine in your liberalism. ‘What kind of government did you create, sir?’ ‘We created a republic, if [you] can keep it.’ The ‘if you can keep it’ part requires a steel spine.”
“As a former graduate student in religious studies and writer of the classics, it is deeply regrettable that the scholarship of the academy does not reach further and that century-old myths no longer of any substantial prominence in academic study still hold public sway.”
“A disconnect ensues: Even as the American public has indeed polarized, our elected representatives have fled to the extremes to an even greater degree.”
” I think that we are, as always, pragmatic idealists.”
“So, yes—my friend has a point: To someone who has never given a moment’s thought to whether Jesus was a real person or not, he does seem like an entirely fictional character.”
“It’s not that there’s anything wrong with debate. In fact, debate, in certain circumstances, can be good, but we can often solve the problems…through conversation.”
