New Zealand bike enthusiasts were able to accomplish a diplomat’s dream: getting North and South Korea to agree on something. Being permitted to traverse the Baekdudaegan range–which North and South Korea share–the couple took in the sights with the hopes of reminding others that the regions have more in common than they think. Learn more about their story here.
To put it another way: if we’re going to treat the unborn with utmost care and protection, we should at least be consistent and apply those same values systems to the young lives also affected by political decision makers.
The Article: ‘Life Keeps Changing’: Why Stories, Not Science, Explain the World by Joe Fassler in The Atlantic.
The Text: The natural world is a source of wonder and even horror for Jennifer Percy, author of Demon Camp, but science can only explain so much. After Percy read Lawrence Sargent Hall’s “The Ledge” for the first time in college, she dropped her physics major—and started asking questions about story, memory, and narrative. Stories, she now says—invented, reported—better capture the full, complex reality of human beings and our surrounding universe.
In Demon Camp, a work of immersion journalism, Percy tells the story of a rural faith community where people “receive deliverance” through Christian exorcisms. The Covenant Bible Institute is funded, in part, by the efforts of Army Sgt. Caleb Daniels, who came home from Afghanistan suffering from suicidal ideation and frightening hallucinations Percy grounds the story—in which she plays a central role—in the history and science of trauma-induced hysteria. But scholarship is never used to dispute or dispel the visceral “realness” of the demons her haunted subjects live with. Percy’s willingness to entertain her characters’ logic reaches its height in the book’s climax—when she agrees to undergo an exorcism herself. Last week, the New York Times Book Review compared Demon Camp to James Agee’s classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Surprise: he hates it as much as he does a meddling Stark.
In other words, it’s the party–not principle–that dictates a politician’s actions. Color us shocked.
