Afternoon Links — 11.15.10

Big box stores hide the “high cost of cheap” , which includes not only environmental problems but “a living-standard masquerade at the twilight of middle-class prosperity.”

Ridiculing celebrities for their interest in Africa does address the real problem of celebrity work for Africa “for the developing world and of the division of the globe into Third World victims and Western saviours,” which those who ridicule the celebrities also support.

Economists and comedians in Ireland tell jokes about the country’s economic crisis , like “”Ireland needs a new credit rating agency. Moody & Poor.”

A list of statements on the right to life by Pope Benedict XVI and the American Catholic bishops.

“In the 21st century, libraries are about much more than books!” declares the American Library Association boasts, “further inching libraries from centers of enlightenment to places of amusement,” writes one regretful observer.

Patrick Deneen examines Damon Linker’s book The Religious Test , and thinks that his  ”view of liberal neutrality, then, disproportionately burdens . . . those religious beliefs that have a public or political dimension” — in other words, that it isn’t truly neutral.

Jeff Mirus argues that Western elites have realized that ” The Church has ceased to be a reliable ally , and it is instinctively understood that this can only get worse — that the Catholic Church is slowly gearing up for a fight to take back its own,” and that this is good for the Church.