weekend wrap up.
Here is a long, detailed and informative look at health care and the profit motive from Avik Roy. Be sure to read the whole thing.
When it comes to health care, liberals and conservatives often seem to be living in two different worlds. To those on the left, America’s health-care system is a heartless capitalist jungle: a place where the bottom line is king, and the working poor are exploited. President Obama, for example, has accused insurance companies of holding Americans hostage in exchange for profits, and doctors of cashing in on children’s sore throats by needlessly removing their tonsils. The right, meanwhile, sees American health care as an outpost of socialism: The government distorts prices and suppresses innovation, impairing the quality and affordability of care and constraining individual autonomy. Hence Republicans’ call for less government involvement in insurance, and their complaints that heavy-handed Medicare rules are the source of our woes.
Simply put, liberals believe that health care is treated as a market commodity today but should not be, and conservatives think that health care is not treated as a market commodity but should be.
Here is an interesting page where five films (iron man, star trek, dark knight, no country for old men, and twilight) are dissected theologically on video.
2. Star Trek
In this 21st-century makeover of a classic series, Kirk has no father and Spock’s dad is emotionally absent. How these young men discover their purpose in life, and get embedded in a mission-focused team that becomes their family, mirrors more than simply a gospel of space exploration.
and here is a news story from the Christian Science Monitor on the resurgence of calvinism.
The renewed interest arrives at a crucial inflection point for American religion. After reviewing a landmark opinion survey last year that showed a precipitous decline in the number of people who identify themselves as Christian, Newsweek declared ominously that we may be witnessing “the end of Christian America.”
In some ways, Newsweek may have understated the shift. Five hundred years after Martin Luther posted his 95 theses challenging the Roman Catholic Church, some religion watchers see not just a post-Christian America but an unraveling of the Protestant Reformation itself. Their alarm is rooted in surveys that show a watering down of Christian beliefs.
Now come the New Calvinists with their return to inviolable doctrines and talk of damnation – in essence, the Puritans, minus the breeches and powdered wigs. Is this just a moment of nostalgia or the beginning of a deeper revolt against the popular Jesus-is-our-friend approach of modern evangelicalism? Where, in other words, is Christianity going?