THE STATE of religion in politics today is a disappointment to those who hear echoes of fire in the voices of the prophets. Historically, the Left has veered away from religion. Today, it has considered religion primarily through the challenge of defending marginalized groups. But it must move beyond that and recognize the transformative power of the religious imagination to inspire change. Only a pluralist project of prophetic vision can accomplish the task.
CoHo – Democratic Socialism
You fell in love with this place early on and never left. You enjoy long-winded but hopelessly idealistic political conversations with friends over cups of coffee and you even get some work done once in a while. Last week you started learning Swedish on Duolingo for the third time. Jack Kerouac is your guilty pleasure, and you pretend to appreciate the free-form sound at jazz night. Some people online have written articles criticizing this place, but you don’t pay much attention to that.
Continue reading “What Your Favorite Stanford Eatery Says About Your Fringe Political Ideology”
On April 10, Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of Congress on how Facebook manages user data, defending his company against accusations of privacy violations. In light of this scandal, Facebook quietly dropped a plan with hospitals and health organizations to receive anonymized patient hospital records in a data sharing program that included Stanford’s own medical school. The data would be anonymized before being shared to avoid privacy violations, but Facebook planned to deanonymize the data, ostensibly to look out for users’ health. This planned invasion of privacy exemplifies the dangers of Silicon Valley’s move into the healthcare industry. If Silicon Valley tech giants become omnipresent forces in the healthcare industry, like Facebook is for social media or Amazon for e-commerce, they would be able to manipulate the decisions we make regarding our bodies, or even eliminate the possibility of freely making those choices. This is a violation of our human right to bodily autonomy, which demands that we be able to freely make choices about our bodies and that no one else make such choices without our consent.
Stanford Sphere 