• On Russian distrust of U.S. missile plan
Press TV interviewed William Beeman, a professor of cultural and linguistic anthropology at the University of Minnesota, about U.S.-Russia relations especially in terms of Washington and NATO’s new plans to build an anti-missile system around Western Europe.
In response to a question about American plans to strengthen military bases in Alaska, Beeman replied, “This is an old, old story. The United States tried to establish missiles in Eastern Europe, supposedly in the Czech Republic, I believe, in order to defend against the attacks, as they said, from Iran. Now we are talking about North Korea.
“So the difficulty of course for Russia is that Russia wants to make sure that these missiles would not ever be deployed against Russia, and I can tell you that Russia borders both on Iran and on North Korea. So it is very hard for the United States to guarantee the Russians in any satisfactory way that these missiles would never be used against Russian territories, and I can really understand the Russians’ trepidation about this.”
• Christian belief, practice, and mental health
The Deseret News of Salt Lake City carried an opinion piece in response to a recent New York Times column by Stanford anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann, where she says that the reason is not entirely clear why church attendance “boosts the immune system and decreases blood pressure. It may add as much as two to three years to your life.”
She speculates that it is the social support of a congregation and the healthy habits of churchgoers. In clinical terms, she explains how someone can experience a God they can’t see and she observes, “those who were able to experience a loving God vividly were healthier — at least, as judged by a standardized psychiatric scale.”
Luhrmann is a professor of cultural anthropology at Stanford University and the author of When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God.
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