May 2007 Archives

Daniel Larison's website has been down all day -- the bandwidth has been exceeded. Argh! I need my daily fix of the Dark Paleocon Lord's brilliant musings, and I'm not getting it. John Podhoretz, I know you're behind this somehow...

So, if it's understandable when society evolves to discard myths that no longer serve its perceived interests (or at least desires), why shouldn't religion be subject to the same laws of evolution? The modernist says they absolutely should; the traditionalist says they should not.

But here it gets complicated. Tradition has to be flexible enough to adapt to different circumstances without losing its core principles. And when the required/desired adaptation is too difficult to manage credibly, sometimes tradition will make a face-saving adjustment, and call it fidelity (e.g., the fact that modernizing Islamic nations have developed a Muslim banking system that somehow gets around Islamic prohibitions on interest). The question facing Christians now is whether or not the Christian faith should adapt itself to modern sexual mores. As anybody reading these comboxes can see, it's a question that generates far more heat than light.

One can more easily give up, say, reverence for the Alamo, or Robert E. Lee, etc., than reverence for the Bible and the saints, because the former is secular history, and the latter is sacred history. The fate of one's eternal soul does not depend on whether or not one reveres Stonewall Jackson (though the fate of one's culture probably does). Real religion, serious religion, instead of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, is a myth that's true. That was Tolkien's line to Lewis, explaining Christianity in a nutshell: a myth that's true. R.E. Lee, or the King of France, or Tsar Nicholas, might have been a hero or a villain, but in the end, the Kingdom of God doesn't stand or fall on who you say they are. In the Christian view, it does stand or fall on who you say Jesus is.

I get "This American Life" via podcast, and listened to the latest one this morning (you can download it by following that link, or in iTunes). It was a stunner. One of the segments was about the work of Conrad Crane, a historian at the US Army War College, who with colleague W. Andrew Terrill produced this February 2003 monograph. It was a document, based on study of historical experience, intended to guide the American occupation of Iraq, by warning the military what would happen if they did, or failed to do, certain things. Like the TAL correspondent said, it reads like a letter from the future predicting exactly what did happen in Iraq. Here's the PDF version. Note especially the warning that to disband the Iraqi army would be to annihilate one of the only sources of unity in the country, and could send its soldiers straight into the arms of sectarian militias.

This is not a new story; James Fallows reported on it a couple of years ago in The Atlantic. But it's new to me. The point is, nobody in the administration can say they weren't warned about what could happen in Iraq. They were. They chose to ignore it because it didn't suit their ideological vision. Nothing that happened in Iraq after the end of the first phase of the war surprised Conrad Crane. It shouldn't have surprised President Bush, Secretary Rumsfeld, or any of them. They chose not to believe it. And now look.

It seems that Rumsfeld et alia chose to disbelieve it because if historian Crane was right, then he, Rumsfeld, was wrong in his theories about how the US military needed to be transformed. So he -- and the commander in chief he served -- chose theory over experience. The arrogance simply beggars belief. If you listen on in that This American Life podcast, you'll hear an interview with the WaPo's Tom Ricks, on the ground in Baghdad, warning that people who expect a clean and swift withdrawal from Iraq are deluding themselves. He says we will see months of long convoys crawling across the desert to Kuwait, trailing refugees, and possibly coming under enemy assault. It will be a long, drawn-out, ugly humiliation.

Why do elites do this to themselves and the organizations and people they serve? Is there a grand unified theory of elite behavior that explains this? Catholics were asking the same question about their bishops in the wake of the sex abuse disaster. No bishop could claim he didn't know what was happening, and what was going to happen if it wasn't dealt with (in fact, the 1985 Doyle-Mouton Report was in many ways an analogue to the 2003 Crane-Terrill Report). See, I don't believe that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith wanted to do harm to the military and the country -- not in the least. Nor do I believe that the Catholic bishops wanted to harm the Church. In both cases, I take it as a given that they thought they were doing the right thing. But in both cases, they were so blinded by their own mistaken interests that they chose the wrong path, with catastrophic results.

How does political theory explain this kind of failure of leadership? I seem to recall from my college studies that someone -- Schumpeter, maybe? -- said that in time, elites will unconsciously come to identify the institution's best interest with their own. This could explain the Catholic bishops' institutional behavior, but can it really explain Bush's and Rumsfeld's, given their status as short-timers?

Are there other examples of a leadership class making the same terrible mistakes? I don't count people like the Enron executives, because I think they made their decisions out of deliberate, knowing corruption.

I was thinking this morning about the (cultural) fate of the Alamo myth in this era of mass Mexican migration spurred by the economy, and I reflected again on Daniel Bell's point about each age constructing the myths that work for it. (I use "myth" here not in the sense of something being untrue, but in the sense of a story that a society tells to explain itself to itself). Bell, again:

Every society seeks to establish a set of meanings through which people can relate themselves to the world. These meanings specify a set of purposes or, like myth and ritual, explain the character of shared experiences, or deal with the transformations of nature through human powers of magic or techne. These meanings are embodied in religion, in culture, and in work.

I thought about the role all the myths of the Old South play in the culture in which I was raised. It's not news that the history of the Confederacy, which was pretty sacred to my grandmother's generation and older, means relatively little to my generation. Key word there: relatively. It's hard for white people my age and younger to have anything like the same cultural and emotional relationship to the Civil War that our parents, grandparents and older relatives did. I find that the only time I really think about the Civil War figures is when somebody wants to sandblast the name of Robert E. Lee off the side of a school. I generally hate changing history to suit the mores of the moment, but it's also true that I resent the implication that I have to be ashamed of everything about my culture.

And yet, I find that I don't care much about the Old South. I grew up in the Deep South, yet we didn't often hear those old tales told growing up. I was raised in the time of the so-called New South, when the Southern overclass made a point of distancing itself from the South's history. And who can blame them? The civil rights era was just ending, and so much of the vicious, racist reaction to it was expressed using the history and symbols of the Old South. Fair or not, Southern regional consciousness was bound up with anti-black hatred. The Southern business class realized that it was in their economic interest to put all that behind us.

And so we did.

I'd like to be proved wrong, but I doubt very much you could walk into a classroom in most Southern towns and get five good sentences out of your average schoolboy about R.E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson or any of the other sacred Confederate personages. My mom can tell you about Jefferson Davis, but I can't, not really. It's not that my generation despises Davis, or Lee, or anybody else. It's that we're largely indifferent to them. And our culture made it so: yes, the New South business mentality that made Atlanta "the city too busy to hate" (but also made it the city that traded its particular identity to be as bland as any Yankee city); but also, I think, the widespread exposure to television, which provided a powerful counternarrative. I say "counternarrative," but what I really mean is not that it challenged Southern particularism directly, but that it replaced it by making Fonzie, Barbarino, Bo & Luke Duke, et alia, the mythic figures in our young imaginations. I'm not joking when I say that Boss Hogg was more real to me than Jefferson Davis. You may call that a tragedy -- and now, at 40, I do -- but there it is. The Southern culture in which I was raised, either by design or benign neglect, didn't pass on those stories to its children -- or did so in a greatly diluted form.

In Bell's terms, you could say that the Old South myth no longer suited Southern society's needs. The white ruling class saw that holding so tightly to those myths were impeding solving the racial problem, which was keeping the South from progressing economically. Economic progress being judged the most important thing, the myths were allowed to die. Aside from economic progress, insofar as clinging to those myths were allowing white people to hold fast to the apartheid system, at least in their minds, they needed to die. The point here is not to argue about the relative goodness or badness of the South; the point is that within living memory Southern white people generally had a real knowledge of and emotional relationship to the gods of the Old South. And now they don't. What larger forces transforming Southern society caused that to happen?

The same forces, I'd wager, that will make something similar happen to the Alamo myth here in Texas. When a myth ceases to have power over the heart of a people, and only exists in their head, it will die. This is true with religion; a religion that is only carried in the head is a religion that is on its way to oblivion in the next generation or two. I have not been in Texas long enough to know how the younger generations feel about the Alamo. I spoke to a 50-year-old friend the other day, a Texas native who is a liberal Democrat, and she was visibly shocked by the thought that any Texan would do anything other than revere the Alamo myth. She honestly couldn't comprehend that anyone would believe Santa Anna the hero of that story. I thought for a second about the difference between her and me -- I honor the Alamo myth in my head, but for her, it is primarily a felt thing.

How many Texans in the coming generations will feel devotion to the heroes of the Alamo (who, fortunately for them, aren't tainted by slavery as Lee, Jackson, Davis and the others are)? Will the needs of business in this rapidly Latinizing state require a renegotiation of that myth -- or will people simply allow it to fade away, because they don't grasp its importance? How important is it, anyway?

When the United Methodists voice their slogan "Open hearts, open minds, open doors," they're not kidding:

Yesterday - after undergoing a sex-change operation and taking on a new symbolic name - the Rev. Drew Phoenix received another one-year contract to head St. John's United Methodist Church.

"This is about more than me," Phoenix said after the decision by the bishop of the Baltimore-Washington Conference of the United Methodist Church. "This is about people who come after me, about young people in particular who are struggling with their gender identity. I'm doing this for them."

As Diogenes at Catholic World News says, that's one way to settle a controversy over the ordination of women. Wasn't there a Catholic bishop not too long ago who gave permission for a man surgically rearranged to resemble a woman to enter a convent as a nun?

Perhaps you thought Holland's free-for-all sex culture had no standards. You may have thought that the recent arrest of an HIV-positive rape gang, which sexually assaulted men with the intention of infecting them with the AIDS virus, was unsurprising, given...

Last year, Julie and I rented "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" on the recommendation of a friend, but with great trepidation. We thought it would amount to a bunch of vicious jokes making fun of the idea of sexual purity. But surely,...

Whatever might be said about her husband's politics, Mrs. Dennis Kucinich has exquisitely crunchy tastes in clothes-shopping: she buys a lot at resale shops and thrift stores. I'm never prouder of my wife than when she brings out Baby Nora...

From the conservative columnist Georgie Anne Geyer's latest: But by all reports, President Bush is more utterly convinced than ever of his righteousness.Friends of his from Texas were shocked recently to find him nearly wild-eyed, thumping himself on the chest...

Karl Rove says that things are moving the GOP's way, because America grows more religious (ergo, culturally conservative), and more enamored of the economic liberties granted by the free market:“There are two or three societal trends that are driving us...

Remember the case from a few summers ago of the Arab men behaving strangely on that flight to LA -- the one passenger Annie Jacobsen made a big deal over, and was subsequently pilloried by CAIR and some government officials...

I ran across something over the weekend about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the presidential lie that launched the Vietnam War, and got to thinking the other day about my friend N., who used to serve in a position very...

Victor Morton observes the death of a great American: Charles Nelson Reilly, one of the crown princes of '70s trash TV. He quotes yours truly thus:I've got on my refrigerator a yellowed newspaper photo of Charles Nelson Reilly, Brett Somers...

Did you know that Iraqi Christians are sneaking across the US-Mexico border, fleeing Islamist persecution? Here's a fascinating story from the San Antonio Express-News detailing the phenomenon. Excerpt:The journey north from Guatemala through Mexico to the Texas border lasted 17...

The other day I mentioned in a blog posting how striking I found it that a fourth-grader in a local school -- a Hispanic boy, the son of Mexican immigrants who can't speak English -- stood in the presence of...

A male Episcopal priest "marries" another male Episcopal priest in a quasi-Episcopal ceremony ... and announces the wedding on the society pages of The New York Times. Excerpt from the announcement:The couple met 15 years ago this week, shortly after...

Here's my DMN column on tradition from today's paper -- the column I blegged for help on a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to everybody who participated, especially the Lutherans who wrote in. I had to take the Lutheran passage...

An ingredient that's in lots of soft drinks -- LIKE DIET COKE, SOFT DRINK OF THE GODS -- could mess up your DNA. Oh great. Somebody please do the necessary googling to prove that it's all a big fat lie!...

Turns out that two people wrote to Prof. Andrew Bacevich, the Vietnam and Gulf War vet whose son died a couple of weeks ago in combat in Iraq, and told him that his opposition to the war killed his son....

Tomorrow is Pentecost, which William Pike calls "the crazy uncle we just ignore." He notes that it's the very birthday of the Church, yet so many Christian churches today either don't observe it, or just pass over it lightly. I...

Matthew finished the first grade on Friday. His school, Providence Christian School of Texas, held their end-of-year school program, which ended with all the children from the lower grades singing the hymns they'd learned that year. I had to get...

Wm F. Buckley says "The Lives of Others" is the best movie he's ever seen. Have you seen it yet? Go!...

What a pleasure to read Rebecca Mead's "Talk of the Town" entry in the current New Yorker, detailing conversations she had at a Manhattan cocktail party to honor the actress Ellen Burstyn, who has just written a memoir, and the...

...maybe that reunion of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church that I thought was so encouraging wasn't all it was cracked up to be. From a column in the Wall Street Journal:As long as...

Dr. John Bickle of the University of Cincinnati writes:Since there's no test (a la Jeff Foxworthy) for determining whether one is a crunchy con, I thought I'd go to the source and ask you. My wife Marica Bernstein and I...

From a reader:Got a letter in the mail from the RNC yesterday. Here's a paragraph I found interesting:"Your commitment to our core principles of lower taxes, a strong national defense, limited government and individual freedom is the driving force behind...

It's often said of neoconservatives that they approve of religion in instrumentalist terms: because religion makes for more successful individual and societies. The people who point this out do so by way of criticism. And why not? If you believe...

I can understand why the anti-war left is angry at the Democrats for not holding firm on the war funding bill, and sending President Bush a no-strings-attached supplemental. But they need to chill. This victory is the last one the...

A reader writes a long, thoughtful objection to the Ron Maxwell essay:I share many of your anxieties about the effects of mass immigration from the GlobalSouth, above all Mexico and Central America, to this country. But reading what I took...

Noting that the Pew poll found that 47 percent consider themselves Muslim first and American second, while 42 percent consider themselves Christian first and American second, an Andrew Sullivan reader writes, snarkily, that he hopes American can assimilate those Christians...

It's going to get national distribution! This just in, from a press release from Oregon Public Broadcasting:Oregon Public Broadcasting to Distribute “Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Muslim Center”Portland, OR, May 23, 2007 - Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) today announced...

If you read nothing else today, by all means read this superlative, deeply felt, uber-crunchy, populist essay by Ron Maxwell, on the meaning of home in an age of mass immigration. He says the people who want mass immigration to...

My newspaper, the Dallas Morning News, has for some time taken a position in favor of immigration reform along the lines of what's being proposed in this compromise bill. I'm in the minority on the editorial board in opposing this...

I asked a friend of mine who practices immigration law in a major Midwestern city what he thought of the immigration bill. I know him to be a conservative Republican and a supporter of President Bush. This is what he...

Andy picked the wrong girl. IJS....

(Finally, a non-immigration post).The Pew Center has produced the first truly independent, comprehensive survey of American Muslims and their beliefs. The results are surprising, and mostly encouraging. It finds that most US Muslims are middle-class, assimilated or assimilating, and far...

A reader in the Texas capital who's a friend of mine has been telling me from some time now about no end of problems from a day labor site in his neighborhood, established by the People's Republic of Austin. It...

A follow on the last post. The kind of traditionalist conservatism I espouse advocates working to re-establish a sense of place, and of neighborhoods, and neighborliness. One of the disorders of our age -- and indeed, the source of so...

As expected, a federal judge has temporarily suspended the recently approved city ordinance in Farmers Branch, a Dallas suburb, that would have required apartment owners to verify the residency status of those seeking to rent. The idea is to prevent...

On Saturday, we drove out to the country to attend the open house of Rehoboth Ranch, the Hutchins family farm (if you read "Crunchy Cons," you'll remember the Hutchinses as a conservative Christian farm family raising livestock organically, because they...

Last week, the south Jersey mosque where three of the alleged Fort Dix terrorists worshiped held an open house to declare itself a peaceful mosque, and to demonstrate to the public that they couldn't have learned anything about terrorism there....

I think Jonah Goldberg puts his finger precisely on the reason why this immigration compromise is in trouble on the right:The chief cause of misunderstanding is the issue of trust. The White House thought that that if they had all...

Matthew was ill this morning, so Lucas and I left Julie and the baby home while we went to liturgy. Liturgy in the Orthodox church is long, so we usually bring a picture book or something to distract Lucas during...

...a new Catholic blog that's very dense and very thoughtful....

Andrew Sullivan gets a letter from a reader, who writes:What American 'conservatism' has become fits closely within the definition of fascism: an intensely nationalist movement intent on defining membership in the 'nation' on linguistic, religious, and (increasingly) ethnic/racial criteria, accompanied...

A reader just wrote to ask why I'd deleted his post, because it didn't seem overly harsh to him. I told him I hadn't deleted it, or even seen it. Haloscan must be acting up again. Just wanted y'all to...

You've all by now heard the jaw-dropping tale, from former Justice Department No. 2 James Comey's testimony, of how White House Counsel Alberto "Fredo" Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andy Card slipped into the hospital and tried to get a...

Here's a YouTube link to a totally hilarious "Al Qaeda soap opera" parody staged and filmed by National Banana (on whose site you can see the shorter Episode One). Warning: these links were sent to me by ... a Jooooooooooo!...

A friend just sent me a bumper sticker:BE NICE TO AMERICAOr we'll bring democracy to your country...

I'm working on a column for future publication about Pope Benedict's expected ruling that will grant universal permission for the celebration of the Latin mass (at the moment, it's only permitted with permission of the local bishop, many of whom...

It's good news that the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia has now ended its schism with the Moscow Patriarchate. But get a load of the 2003 quote by ex-KGB man Putin, which set into motion the reunion:The atmosphere was...

I've been interested in and somewhat excited by Ron Paul not because I could vote for him -- he's a libertarian, and I'm a conservative -- and not because I agree with his stringently non-interventionist foreign policy (the guy thinks...

A creative use for Lysol in 1926. Eighty years from now, what common medical or hygienic practice will we look back on as insane?...

Reader Rob, a high school teacher, sent in this link to a four-minute Eisenhower campaign commercial from 1956. It's really something to watch it today, with its constant appeals to peace, and to grasp that a Republican president was appealing...

Just to be clear, I do not believe that America "deserved" 9/11, nor do I believe that our presence in the Mideast is the only, or even the most important, reason the Islamists attacked us. And my support for Israel...

I went to bed last night thinking about the Paul-Giuliani exchange at the debate last night. I viscerally reacted against Paul for bringing up the possibility that America could bear some responsibility for 9/11, because of our prior military involvement...

I want to pull that bottle of Tito's out of my freezer and climb into it. This is really depressing, though not unrelievedly so. I think Tommy Thompson is coming off the worst. He's coming across like an animatronic figure...

Well, I don't know if he's a conservative, but Paul Atkinson's certainly crunchy and Catholic. Here's the story of Laughing Stock Farm in Eugene, Oregon. Excerpt:Paul does this because he sees farming as an act of stewardship of God's creation....

See the trailer for the controversial film!...

Daniel Larison notices something interesting:George Kennan had an outstanding remark about “that curious law which so often makes Americans, inveterately conservative at home, the partisans for radical change everywhere else.” This is often on display in mainstream conservative rhetoric vis-a-vis...

Well, there goes half the conservative Evangelical sources in the average American journalist's Rolodex. When Pat Robertson goes to be with the Lord, what on earth will the news media do?OK, sorry, that's not the way to get into a...

Via Reihan, this essay by libertarian Edward Glaeser. Key passage:I start with the view that individual freedom is the ultimate goal for any government. The ultimate job of the state is to increase the range of options available to its...

Lee Penn e-mails this morning with sad news: the son of the military theorist Andrew J. Bacevich has been killed on duty by an IED in Iraq. Dr. Bacevich is a Boston University professor, a retired officer and a conservative...

1. The IAEA has a new report out today:VIENNA, May 14 — Inspectors for the International Atomic Energy Agency have concluded that Iran appears to have solved most of its technological problems and is now beginning to enrich uranium on...

George Weigel writes about Pope Benedict's new book. Excerpt from the Weigel:These are themes that Joseph Ratzinger has been developing for almost half a century. In that sense, Jesus of Nazareth (and its promised successor volume) is a great summing-up...

Interesting e-mail responses to my Sunday column about Muslim moderates, like Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, and their courageous struggle against Islamists. This struggle is documented in the PBS-commissioned film "Islam vs. Islamists: Voices from the Center," which PBS has inexplicably declined...

If you haven't seen this essay from yesterday's NYTimes, stop whatever you're doing and read it now. A woman and her husband travel to China to adopt a baby. Before they even leave China with Baby Natalie, a doctor discovers...

Professor Bainbridge offers his ideas about qualities he'd like to see in the next president that have nothing whatsoever to do with the job. Here's my short list:+ doesn't give a rip about staying physically fit, or sports+ prefers Stones...

After all the money and the foofarah, The CBS Evening News with Katie Couric remains in the ratings toilet. Why does this surprise anybody? The audience for the evening news is a serious one -- meaning that if you're going...

From my Dallas Morning News column today, criticizing PBS for suppressing its excellent documentary "Islam vs. Islamists," which features anti-Islamist Muslim Americans speaking out:"They've basically turned our mosques into a political party of their own," says Dr. Jasser, a Phoenix...

I finally saw last evening "The Lives of Others," the Best Foreign Film winner at this year's Oscar awards. Here's Anthony Lane's rave review in The New Yorker. Go there for details of this incredible, unforgettable film; I don't want...

If you live in the Cookstown, NJ, area, please go buy a pizza from this poor man, who appears to have done nothing wrong, but is on the verge of losing everything. Asked on Thursday how he was coping, an...

Lucas, to his mother yesterday, in the store:"Mom, just you and baby sister can shop. Mans like me and Daddy and Babboo [i.e., "brother"] don't like shopping. It makes me nervous."...

You might recognize Dale Price's name from the comboxes, and/or his own blog. He, his wife Heather, and their unborn child need your prayers right now....

I wish they'd put this clash of the culture warriors on pay-per-view....

Apologies today for no blogging. I had a very busy day at work, and this is the first chance I've had to get to the blog. One of our regular readers, a small businesswoman, wrote me privately about Orson Scott...

Dom Bettinelli calls our attention to an Orson Scott Card column arguing for designing cities to make it more possible to live without being so dependent on cars. The part of the essay that really caught Dom's interest was Card's...

I didn't want this addendum to the long Homestead Heritage post below to get lost, so here it is in a second post. There's a Part 3 to the Waco newspaper's story, in which Homestead Heritage defends itself from the...

I am exhorted by She Who Must Be Obeyed to post a link to this NYTimes story about a way to grow lettuce and other greens in your backyard without a garden. Excerpt:If you love fresh greens, there is no...

Lucas, my three-year-old, at prayer the other night:"Dear God, please help the peoples in Iraq ... and California ... and, and ... at Home Depot."...

From Daniel Larison:Today, Republicans are to warfare what Democrats traditionally have been to welfare. Both insist that we must be willing to “sacrifice” and “pay any price” for the sake of higher ideals, but in both cases the ones insisting...

David Frum's post about the crop of GOP presidential hopefuls is getting a lot of deserved attention. He makes a brief case that the GOP field is objectively one of the best we've had in ages -- but that the...

From Sarkozy's first speech as France's president-elect:"I want to launch a call to all those in the world who believe in the values of tolerance, of liberty, of democracy and of humanism, to all those who are persecuted by the...

I've been making an informal list of communities I want to visit for researching my next book. One of them is just down the road from me here in Dallas: Homestead Heritage, a Protestant Christian community where about 900 members...

NBC's Tim Russert had an exclusive report tonight on a White House meeting this week between the president and his top advisers and 11 GOP Congressmen. Topic: the war in Iraq. According to Russert, participants in the meeting described it...

Christianity Today interviews Baylor's Francis Beckwith, the just-resigned president of the Evangelical Theological Society, on his recent decision to return to the Catholic Church of his youth. Well worth reading. I especially liked Prof. Beckwith's discussion of how Evangelicals could...

A friend said to me the other day, "Ever notice how you don't see Down syndrome people anymore? Where are they?"Answer: dead, 90 percent of them, by the abortionist's hand. Because their lives are deemed not worth living by their...

A stunning quote:How true are the words of Holy Scripture, 'We know not what a day may bring forth.' If anyone had told me that I would be standing here today to take this office, I would have been totally...

Cal Thomas writes about the ongoing demise of the Religious Right as a force in American politics: One of the major players in what came to be known as the "Religious Right" in the 1980s has shut its doors. The...

Hey, President Bush, how's it going for fellow Christian believers in liberated Baghdad? Uh, not so great, says the Chicago Tribune:Christians are fleeing in droves from the southern Baghdad district of Dora after Sunni insurgents told them they would be...

Holy guacamole, Rupert Murdoch is going green! From Grist:Today, the fast-growing cadre of corporate leaders pressing for climate action welcomes a new member: Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corporation, the media empire that encompasses Fox News, 20th Century Fox, HarperCollins,...

Clearly the Rev. Al Sharpton is a boob, and not just because he said this about Mitt Romney (and is ludicrously trying to backtrack):"As for the one Mormon running for office, those who really believe in God will defeat him...

I'm late getting to this (our issue of the New Yorker always arrives a week late), but last night I read Larissa MacFarquhar's much-discussed profile of Barack Obama, and I've gotta say it only makes me more curious about the...

James Bowman writes on P.D. James' "The Children of Men" and the connection between spiritual and biological barrenness:The central insight of the novel is that all ideas of social improvement and reform, all justice, hope, and love depend on the...

Good news for me: I'll be going to Istanbul on business for a week in early June, and will be blogging from there. Never been before, and am really looking forward to it. If there's one book, either fiction or...

There's a fascinating piece about cities and the future in the spring issue of The American Interest, but you can't read it because it's behind the subscriber firewall. Ha-ha! (he said, Muntzily). But what I want to talk about is...

Not to get all John Cougar Mellencamp-y, but once again, I learned this morning the value of living in a small town. A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the community-wide surprise party the folks in my home community...

In the current issue of Books & Culture, sociologist Brad Wilcox talks with Philip Longman, the liberal author of "The Empty Cradle" (2004) who argues that the declining fertility rate is not only bad for us all, it's especially bad...

TMatt has a q&a with Julie "Bible Girl" Lyons. Click over to read Bible Girl say:Religion coverage may not be selling a lot of ads, but it’s essential to understanding the communities you report on. Get out there and spend...

JPod points to a very moving post in which a young professional woman nearing middle age, husbandless and childless, opens a vein to talk about how much that hurts. I was not one hour ago e-mailing a friend to tell...

I work in a declining industry -- newspaper journalism -- that makes some stupid decisions. But I can't think of any that tops this: the Minneapolis Star-Tribune has ended James Lileks' column, and assigned him to write straight news stories....

Five years ago today, the populist politician Pim Fortuyn was murdered on the verge of being elected leader of the Netherlands. His killer was an animal-rights fanatic claiming to be acting on behalf of immigrants supposedly threatened by Fortuyn. Fortuyn...

When I was at the Russell Kirk Center last October, I participated in a friendly exchange with Vigen Guroian, who is a skeptic of this crunchy-con business. Vigen's basic point was that it's folly for people like me to try...

Gary Seaton forwards this blog post from Prof. Patrick Deneen of Georgetown, who recently spent the afternoon on Wendell Berry's front porch, talking with the great man. Excerpt:He reflected, too, on the course of his career. When he began writing,...

Jim Antle in The American Conservative says that there's only one litmus test today among Republican voters. Abortion? Nope. Gay marriage? Nope. It's the Iraq War. Excerpt:To say that conservatives can compromise on first principles but cannot disagree about how...

Right now on Fox News Channel, purpose-driven Pastor Rick Warren is, according to the chyron, teaching America "how to prepare for DC Madam's bombshell list."...

Chuck Todd, the political director of NBC News, has a helpful analysis of a core aspect of the crisis confronting Republicans today: Just what is a conservative anymore? It all comes down to the old traditionalist vs. libertarian divide. That...

"The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events." -- Winston Churchill."The leader must aim high, see big,...

I've mentioned before having been in the audience at a conservative panel discussion last year when someone put to the panelists a question about prospects for conservatives. Phyllis Schlafly talked about the need to reform the judiciary and the public...

It's not just suppressing the anti-Islamist Muslim documentary. In today's Dallas Morning News, I write to criticize PBS for knuckling under to Latino interest groups and members of Congress, and forcing Ken Burns to alter his WW2 documentary presentation. (The...

Diogenes at the Catholic World News blogsite observes that when religious believers bring their faith to the public square and reach conclusions that liberals dislike -- in this case, the Catholic justices on SCOTUS and their upholding the partial-birth abortion...

I wrote last week about the cost of filling our minds with violence and gore, and ignoring the good, the true and the beautiful. Today in the New York Times, a screenwriter agrees. Excerpt:For those who believe that violence in...

When I read Andrew Sullivan's post this morning linking to a blogger's suggestion that the Bush administration is too boring to write novels about, I thought, "Good grief, that can't be right." The relationship between Bush and Cheney, the titanic...

If I had said the other day in our conversation about Sleazy McGreevey -- you know, the ex-governor of New Jersey who cheated on his pregnant wife with a man he'd put on the state payroll -- anyway, if I'd...

Great news! No thanks to this here blog, Beliefnet.com won a National Magazine Award for General Excellence Online. Congratulations to Steve Waldman and the gang for all their great work. Thanks too to you regular commenters who post such consistently...

Have you heard about the flap over PBS spiking the documentary "Islam vs. Islamists," which sympathetically profiled pious Muslims who are fighting to protect their faith and their faith communities from Islamists? I screened a copy of the documentary last...

In trying to argue for the moral licitness of the prudential use of torture, the pro-life Dean Barnett says that yeah, abortion is evil, but sometimes it's a necessary evil when a woman is in desperate circumstances.Mark Shea's head explodes....

...the right is to foreign policy, at least in terms of rigidity, according to Daniel Larison:Liberals are as humourless about matters of race as most “conservatives” are about anything pertaining to foreign policy. For the former, you can’t tell certain...

Edward Luttwak says it's high time that we all quite worrying so much about the Middle East. Excerpt:The third and greatest error repeated by middle east experts of all persuasions, by Arabophiles and Arabophobes alike, by Turcologists and by Iranists,...

Ross Douthat is talking about data showing that the actual ideological stance of a candidate matters far less to the public than the perceived ideological stance. Which explains why so many conservatives have a soft spot for Barack Obama. Ross...

A clerical reader sends along a D.G. Hart essay about Francis Schaeffer and Russell Kirk -- two conservative Christian Tory Bohemians. I've been meaning to read about Schaeffer for a while, since my wife told me about L'Abri. I've got...

The other day I found a combox post by a reader who posts as "AnotherBeliever" so thought-provoking that I posted it here. Well, she's done it again. AB is a female Army linguist on active duty, and an Evangelical Christian....

At least someone still has standards in this vale of vulgarity. From an employee newsletter DC Madam Jeane Palfrey sent to the women who worked for her escort service:"Without being overtly vulgar, a pair of [deleted] and an [deleted], without...

This is stunning. Murray Waas in National Journal:Attorney General Alberto Gonzales signed a highly confidential order in March 2006 delegating to two of his top aides -- who have since resigned because of their central roles in the firings of...

Bruce Bartlett makes a conservative case for -- wait for it -- voting for Hillary Clinton. He says that it's increasingly clear that the Republicans are going to lose the presidency in 2008. That being the case:If I am right,...

I'll be giving a speech on Friday to the annual convention of the Evangelical Press Association. I'm really looking forward to it. I'm nearly done writing the text of the speech, but as I'm not an Evangelical, I'm wondering if...

A reader who is a journalist writes:My own view, for what it's worth, is that there is very likely to be a realignment of some kind after 2008. And while I think social conservatism is unlikely to find much of...

Mighty Favog explores what it means that the Iraq War is about to pass the $500 billion mark. Remember the good old days, when the White House canned Larry Lindsey for telling Congress that it'd cost $200 billion?...