Page 20 - Peter Berger News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

President Barack Obama’s FY 2012 budget proposal would harm charitable organizations by raising the tax rate on upper-income individuals and families and reducing their income tax deduction for charitable donations. These two changes in the tax code would discourage charitable donations and leave the most generous donors with less money to donate. Predictably, they would shift resources from private nonprofit charitable organizations to the federal government, which is consistently less effective and efficient in caring for the needy.

Iain McGilchrist's work indicates that the various insanities manifesting in contemporary cultural life are paralleled in mental illness

It’s been half a century since Poor Elijah first spent Christmas Eve with Ebenezer Scrooge. Even though he’s an English teacher and therefore expected to prefer Dickensian prose, my friend

Only prophets and lunatics hear God's voice directly, but for the rest of us, there are what the late sociologist Peter Berger once described as "signals of transcendence" that erupt suddenly and unexpectedly in the course of human experience. They point us to a reality beyond what we know. Expressing a similar thought, the philosopher Roger Scruton wrote, "it is as though, on the winding ill-lit stairway of our life, we suddenly come across a window, through which we catch sight of another and brighter world – a world to which we belong but which we cannot enter."

At any given moment you could be accosted by a prankster — an agent of chaos. Here’s what you need to know.