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  • transcript

    Religious Literacy: What Every American Should Know

    Pew Forum Faith Angle Conference Key West, Florida Some of the nation’s leading journalists gathered in Key West, Fla., in December 2007 for the Pew Forum’s biannual Faith Angle Conference on religion, politics and public life. Stephen Prothero, chair of the Department of Religion at Boston University, discussed the issue of religious illiteracy in the […]

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    O.J. Leads the Way in a Week of Déjà Vu News

    The arrest of O.J. Simpson not only conjured up memories of the famous murder trial of a dozen years ago, it also recalled the media feeding frenzy that surrounded that trial. And as was the case back in 1995, the story last week was a made-for-TV drama.

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    The Right-to-Die Debate and the Tenth Anniversary of Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act

    Ten years ago this month, Oregon enacted a law permitting physicians to prescribe a lethal dose of drugs to certain terminally ill patients, a practice often called physician-assisted suicide. The Death with Dignity Act, which took effect on Oct. 27, 1997, is the only law of its kind in the United States, making it an […]

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    Cable Talk Hosts Have a Field Day with O.J.

    The Simpson arrest and Hillary Clinton’s health care proposal proved irresistible fodder for the talk show universe last week. Plus, why some newsmakers—like Dan Rather and Alan Greenspan—got more attention on talk shows than in the general news coverage.

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    World Publics Welcome Global Trade — But Not Immigration

    The publics of the world broadly embrace key tenets of economic globalization but fear the disruptions and downsides of participating in the global economy. In rich countries as well as poor ones, most people endorse free trade, multinational corporations and free markets. However, the latest Pew Global Attitudes survey of more than 45,000 people finds they are concerned about inequality, threats to their culture, threats to the environment and the threats posed by immigration. And there are signs that enthusiasm for economic globalization is waning in the West.

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    A Progressive Argument Against the Legalization of Physician-Assisted Suicide

    The debate over physician-assisted suicide is often portrayed as a battle between social or religious conservatives who oppose the practice and liberals or progressives who support it. But not everyone fits neatly into this paradigm. For instance, Dr. Robert P. Jones, who calls himself a progressive, has just written a book urging liberal supporters of […]

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    The big and unanswered questions

    In laying out the important data collection questions, workshop participants touched on five themes, to be discussed in detail in this section of the essay: Productivity: Why are accurate measures of broadband and other information and communication technologies (ICTs) important to measuring the economic productivity? Public policy and government intervention: If government chooses to intervene […]