Sophistication of Political Discourse

Sophistication of Political Discourse. Finally, let’s have a look at political discourse, which most people believe has been getting dumb and dumber. There’s no such thing as the IQ of a speech, but Tetlock and other political psychologists have identified a variable called integrative complexity that captures a sense of intellectual balance, nuance, and sophistication.283 A passage that is low in integrative complexity stakes out an opinion and relentlessly hammers it home, without nuance or...

 Religious Organizations Must have Connections to the Secu...

Science, with its naturalistic approach to understanding the empirical world, has become the dominant standard against which alternative systems of knowledge production must argue. Over the course of the twentieth century, some denominations have reconciled particular truths of Christianity and science. However, fundamentalist Protestant Christians in the U.S. continue to wrestle with contradictions between their literal interpretations of the Bible and alternative cosmologies produced throug...

 The Concept of "Parachurches"

These two seemingly opposite religious organizations, the conservative, evangelical Christian Broadcasting Network and the liberal, new age Association for Research and Enlightenment, in fact share a similar social positioning in that their core philosophies are religious or metaphysical in nature but their institutions are secular in design; they are part business, part charity, and part educational facility. As parachurches, these non-denominational religious organizations offer religious o...