The oldest shipwreck ever found has no ship in it.
Continue readingThe Oldest Shipwreck Has No Ship
How the Ban Was Built
Part Two of three
Part One looked at the question Chris Cornthwaite says his field forbids — did early Christianity borrow from the Greco-Roman religions around it? — and at Samuel Sandmel’s 1962 essay “Parallelomania,” whose warning about extravagance hardened, on Cornthwaite’s account, into a border wall against Greco-Roman comparison itself. But Sandmel was not the foundation. The operating rule was already written seven years before his essay — not by a censor, but by one of the most respected scholars of the century, in language so reasonable that almost nobody noticed what it made impossible.
Continue readingThe FAA Grounded Every Flight in America
At 3:54 PM Eastern on Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration did something it has done only once since September 11, 2001: it ordered every departing flight in the United States to stay on the ground. All of them, at every airport in the country, until further notice — “due to extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.”
Continue readingHe’d Do It Again Tomorrow
On Monday, a Republican congressman stood on the floor of the House of Representatives and read thirty-four pages of impeachment articles against the Secretary of War. On Tuesday, the House voted 211 to 204 to bury them in a committee — without debating a single article, and without voting on whether any of it is true.
Continue readingThe Nod
In 1980 I was twenty-five years old, traveling in China with a tour group, in a country four years out of the Cultural Revolution — where religion had spent a decade being beaten down in public. Every church in the country had been closed. Worship, where it survived at all, survived indoors, in private, in whispers: in homes, among family, behind doors that could be closed quickly. By 1980 a few church buildings were creaking back open, one here, one there, and the state was rebuilding the machinery that would supervise whatever faith it decided to permit. But permission was new, thin, and nobody with any sense trusted it yet.
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