OPINION
August 10, 2009 | GREGORY RODRIGUEZ
There's nothing more cutting edge than fundamentalism. The women swathed in veils in Picadilly Circus, the "facts on the ground" settlers in Jerusalem, the values voters who never give an inch. They wrap themselves in tradition and rage at the godlessness of modernity, but ultimately they are products of the very modernity they hate. Not that long ago it was the secularists who thought they were ahead of the curve, in the vanguard of progress. They wrapped themselves in the illusion that modernity would eradicate religion.
OPINION
October 2, 2009 | Neal Gabler, Neal Gabler is at work on a biography of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.
For decades now, liberals have been agonizing because conservatives seem to win even when polls show that the public generally disagrees with them. In their postmortems, liberals have placed blame on the way they frame their message, or on the right-wing media drumbeat that drowns out everything else, or on the right's co-opting of the flag, Mom and apple pie, which is designed to make liberals seem like effete, hostile foreign agents. It's understandable that liberals prefer to think of their subordination as a matter of their own inadequacies or of conservative wiles.
OPINION
October 8, 2011 | Patt Morrison
Any list of epochal dates in human history would be incomplete without Oct. 15, 1951, when chemist Carl Djerassi, working in Mexico City with his partner Luis Miramontes, created the oral synthetic hormone progesterone, which became the building block of oral contraceptives. For the first time, women could decide when sex would part company with procreation. For Djerassi the writer, that was another life ago. Although he keeps his hand in as a professor emeritus at Stanford University, his passions have moved on. He endowed the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
NEWS
January 15, 1989
I, too, am a non-Orthodox Jew who identifies strongly with the Jewish people and resents any particular Jewish denomination or other subgroup dictating the criteria for who is a Jew. It is particularly offensive when the dictation comes from one of the smallest grouping of the Jewish people--the religious fundamentalists. We in the Jewish community are well aware of the efforts of this small sect to dictate their terms to all Jews but the larger Southern California community is quite unaware of it. Your objective depiction of the issue is, however, more than a journalist's effort to bring attention to hitherto relatively unknown facets of our civilization.
OPINION
December 16, 2004
Re "21st Century Tribes," Opinion, Dec. 12: The roles of sociology and psychology in human behavior are invaluable. Whether to explain tribalism, nationalism or fundamentalism, we cannot know enough about what motivates us. But we cannot persist in the belief that only foreign cultures are vulnerable to the propaganda and manipulation of ill-intentioned colloquial influence. The rise in Christian fundamentalism as a tool for political exploitation signals that it is time to talk about American gullibility.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
March 15, 1986
Your editorial presents with great clarity, brevity and conviction the main evidence for placing the age of the Earth at more than 4 billion years. You must be aware that it will sway none whose mind-set is that of the creationists. Let us hope, though, that some who read it are teetering between absolute religious fundamentalism and common sense. Perhaps they can be brought back to reality. H.W. ANDERSON La Jolla