Dear Ordained Colleagues,

Since open debate about social issues is frowned upon in my professional circle, let me offer these just to be contrary.  Both are valid perspectives worthy of consideration.

No institution or agency has done more to help the poor than Walmart.

and

Providing students four years of tuition-free college does not mean that professors have generously decided to forgo their salaries and academic buildings now come rent-free. In fact, it does not even mean that universities have a plan to cut administrative bloat to focus more of their efforts on academics.

They mean well, but most of my ordained colleagues are East Coast whites; many with inherited money.  They tend to live in a cultural bubble that permits them the ability to see the world as does a college sophomore.  In their bubble, Wal-Mart is always evil, socialism is always good.

[A reminder of The Coracle's purpose: "Just about every parish weblog at the time presented parish information and links to official statements made by the local diocese and the national church offices. They tended to the prosaic.  So, I thought it would be lively to present counter-arguments or perspectives not usually reflected in parochial weblogs, especially as most Episcopal Church thinking in those days [and these] was/is simply a re-statement of whatever was/is read in the New York Times or heard on National Public Radio.

It turns out that a lot of people who were blogging and engaged in Internet commentary had the same idea and online discussions, debates, and arguments became the contemporary equivalent of the Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park or the Oxford Student Union; a place of free thinking and freely exchanged opinion.  It was refreshing, especially since both churches and universities were becoming more and more monolithic in their ideology and more and more intolerant of any deviation from a preferred narrative.  Suddenly, my readership, which was around 6-20 people a week, reached over 300+ a day, and increasingly from international sources....

As The Coracle has been in its current form since 2008, it has developed as an eccentric forum for religious and Christian news not often found in the mainstream, for archaeological developments, circumstances of a gently humorous nature, of inspirational people in danger of being lost to history, of uncommon sources of music, and of occasional commentary, especially when such commentary may be contrary. 

Oh, and surfing."

More here.