Christopher Cocca

Quite a few folks I follow on Twitter are attending the Q 2012 conference in Washington, D.C. One of them just tweeted this, with credit to featured speaker Miroslav Volf:

"We need a thoroughly pluralistic politics informed by deep religious convictions."

I'm not at Q, so I...

Like many of you, I've been following the fall-out over the Obama Administration's decision not to exempt large Catholic employers (hospitals, colleges, social service agencies) from provisions in the new health care laws requiring that enterprises of their scale provide insurance that covers contraceptives.

You don't have to agree with...

Paul Krugman has finally uttered the words. We're in a Depression. His Sunday NYT piece, "Depression and Democracy," is here.

Elsewhere, Leonard Cohen has shared about Depression and Depression:

"Well, you know, there's depression and depression. What I mean by depression in my own case is that depression...

Like many of you, I was very, very upset when I learned of Steve Jobs' passing. He was a technological and commercial visionary in an era that lacked many great leaders. In lieu of trusted political, religious, and economic pioneers, Jobs became something of our proxy president, a stand-in prime...

In the relatively short course of my 31 years, I've learned quite a few things from John Cusack. Just now, via, Twitter, he turned me on to a new piece by Cornel West in yesterday's New York Times: Martin Luther King Jr. Would Want a Revolution, Not a...

Last week, I published a piece in this space called "Ending Poverty With Global Christianity's Phantom Trillion," in which I noted that the global annual income of Christians and Christian institutions worldwide exceeds $10 trillion and that a mere 10 percent of that, if given to the right...

In the '90s, Keith Olbermann was part of a flawless thing called SportsCenter. Even though the political commentary and overall style he's developed since then isn't everyone's cup of tea, this Special Comment from the July 11 edition of "Countdown" is essential viewing for anyone who cares about...

A premise: For whatever reason, people tend to view Google as less of a brand and more of a utility.

Suggested reasons: Google is utilitarian. It's underbranded to the extreme, and even its logo is generic. Before anyone had Google accounts or Gmail, we were already using "google" as a...

Pastor, popular Christian blogger, One Day's Wages co-founder and fellow HuffPost contributor Eugene Cho has a new post up on his personal blog that got me thinking. The post is called "the oldest injustice in human history is the way we treat women." My gut tells me Cho...

"Some might say/they don't believe in heaven/go and tell it to the man who lives in hell." --Noel Gallagher

Stephen Hawking may be the greatest working mind in science, but he apparently never plumbed the depths of What's The Story (Morning Glory)? like his metaphysical life depended on it. I...

Quite a few friends have been sharing this story about the Presbyterian Church (USA) moving toward the acceptance of gay clergy on a national level. It was in my Facebook inbox today and, just a few minutes ago, it came to Gmail from my wife.

I don't know...

Today marks the beginning of the forty-day Christian liturgical season known as Lent, a time of reflection, contemplation, and perhaps even sacrifice in preparation for the coming of the Holy Week that culminates in the celebration of Christ's Easter resurrection. Throughout the world on Wednesday, Christians from across denominations and...

I'm not a medical professional or a mental health expert but, regarding Charlie Sheen, the possibilities are pretty clear: he either needs psychiatric counseling or is secretly one-upping Joaquin Phoenix and James Franco in a rather brilliant meta-stunt. Unfortunately, people who know much more about these things than I do...

And so we meet again, AOL. I remember when you were just a Version 3.0 running on my best friend's Windows 3 PC. I remember your ubiquitous free disks, first floppy, then compact, the sting of still not having you and the joy of my parents' new subscription. As Alice...

As Google gets ready to roll out its latest attempt at getting social right, it's hard to type a for realz around the web without hitting profound and well-deserved skepticism from everyone who remembers Google Wave and Google Buzz. I know both of these projects are technically still around, but...

Human beings are uniquely narrative creatures. Bees gather pollen, make hives, produce honey. Birds build nests. Whatever else we do, Homo sapiens alone curate shared and personal experiences into meaningful narratives, into traditions, religions, and great stories shared across generations.

For premodern peoples, shared story was context, a comment...

News Corp. seems set to have a mixed January. While official word came today that subsidiary MySpace is set to layoff close to 500 employees (47% of its current staff), next week sees the public launch of The Daily, Rupert Murdoch's long-anticipated iPad-only daily newspaper.  According to Cutline,...

Following Advent and Christmastide, Epiphany is the liturgical season during which the Christian tradition has, in theory, stressed the religious inclusion that comes from God's manifestation in Christ and the revelation of that presence to humanity. The celebrative model in the West has traditionally been the visit of the Three Kings/Magi...

I recently did a Google search for "gmail," and this is what came up:

At first, I didn't know what the rest of the story was here, but it made me think. Google serves all kinds of ritual functions: meaning-maker, answer-giver, organizer of information,...

The Chapel of the Holy Cross rises from a 250-foot abutment in Sedona's ferric sandstone, a sort of redundant decoration in this part of Arizona where I-17 and the Red Rock Scenic Byway seem to follow God's own early steps across the Earth. Out here in the desert,...