Word: pointing
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...easy to see his point, if you look at the specifics. In his view, Glee portrays Christians as phonies and hypocrites. He observed that the only self-identified Christian is the shiny blond Quinn, cheerleading president of the celibacy club, who is pregnant by one classmate but pretending the father is another. (To make matters more complicated, in a heartbreaking scene, she begs her parents' forgiveness; in righteous fury, they throw her out of the house.) Meanwhile, the glee-club director, Mr. Schuester, is unhappily married to a perky little spider, which makes the adultery subplot involving him look positively...
...point is not whether there is an embedded moral message to be found beneath all the snark and snideness in this show or any other. The point lies in the surprises that jostle us out of our smug little certainties and invite us to weigh what we value, whatever our faith tradition. I'm reminded of the furor over kids' reading Harry Potter, which some conservative Christian parents rejected because the books dealt with magic and witches and wizards. I never understood why J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis' witches and wizards got a free pass just because the authors wore...
...there is more to gold's current boom than just a flight to safety. The metal is showing signs of a more sustained run at respectability. So while its price will at some point stop going up (and start going down), don't count on another descent into seeming irrelevance, as occurred in the 1980s and '90s. That's because of changes in the mechanics of investing in gold and the weaknesses of the current gold-free international monetary system...
...religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity or disability, the FBI announced in its annual hate-crimes report. The figures represent a 2% increase over 2007, though the FBI, which relies on data supplied voluntarily--and sporadically--by local law-enforcement agencies, warned against comparing statistics from year to year. Advocacy groups point out that violence against illegal immigrants and gays and lesbians is probably underreported because of fears of repercussion or stigma. The data come less than a month after President Obama expanded federal hate-crime law to include crimes motivated by gender or sexual orientation...
...used to plant cash crops, save a $125 "dust payment" issued as an apology for the dirt the project has kicked up. "The Chinese promised us free electricity, free water supply, free job training for our boys," Bilang tells me. "But they have delivered nothing." Tensions reached a crisis point five months ago, when a local youth was accidentally injured by a Chinese-driven tractor. More than 100 villagers went on the rampage, targeting the Chinese with stones and bush knives. The foreigners defended themselves with welding torches, but three were so gravely injured - one had his stomach sliced open...