Word: america
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
President George W. Bush was widely criticized for failing to focus before 9/11 on what U.S. intelligence knew of al-Qaeda's threat to America. But was President Barack Obama similarly remiss in the months before the attempted Christmas Day attack on a Detroit-bound airliner? So far, the White House hasn't provided enough information to make the judgment...
...through its Willow Creek Association. David Campbell, a political scientist at Notre Dame studying the trend, says that "if tens of millions of Americans start sharing faith across racial boundaries, it could be one of the final steps transcending race as our great divider" - and it could help smooth America's transition into a truly rainbow nation. (Watch a Q&A with Joel Osteen...
...however, that changed. Hybels was leaving on vacation when Willow's only African-American pastor, Alvin Bibbs, passed him a book titled Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America, by a then obscure academic named Michael Emerson. The book's polls showed that Evangelicals tended to "believe that their faith ought to be a powerful impetus for bringing people together across race." Yet they had fewer minority acquaintances than non-Evangelicals. Most regarded racial inequality as either illusory or the wages of personal sin, rather than as a societal flaw. This and other buried assumptions...
...catch was that "I hadn't [preached] about it in 24 years." So he promised his congregation, "I'm not going to overwhelm you." Yet he persisted, sermonizing repeatedly about America's racial history and continuing inequities. He pledged to open Willow to every ethnicity. In 2003, he recalls, he threw down the gauntlet, telling his flock that the church's racial outreach was "part of who we are, and if it can't be part of who you are, you probably need to find a church that doesn't talk about this issue...
...exports plenty of things that much of the world would gladly send back: the Golden Arches, Jerry Bruckheimer movies and Baywatch, to name a few. But in addition to the cultural flotsam that drives the rest of the world crazy, America is literally exporting its mental illnesses. "In teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been, for better and worse, homogenizing the way the world goes mad," writes journalist Ethan Watters. He traces how conditions first widely diagnosed in the U.S., such as anorexia and PTSD, have spread abroad "with the speed of contagious diseases...