In his column yesterday, E.J. Dionne documents what he calls “right-wing Catholics” showing themselves to be “more Catholic than the pope” in opposition to Notre Dame’s honoring of President Obama at Commencement next week. He does this with a funny sleight-of-hand . . . . Continue Reading »
Doesn’t anybody play air guitar any more? Dude, you say. Air guitar? You mean, like, just . . . listening to some loud music and . . . pretending? Yeah, see, back in the day, what you would do was, you would put on a record in your room. A record. It’s a big round thing that comes in a . . . . Continue Reading »
Another excerpt from some recent work: The basic political premise of techno-politics is that the classic question regarding competing claims to rule has been decisively answered: instead of Plato’s philosopher king we get its emasculated modern descendant, the rational bureaucrat. The . . . . Continue Reading »
Poor Sarah Palin, Joan Vennochi writes today in the Boston Globe : Even though she has no shot at the presidency, Republicans and Democrats still fear her and attack her. And her teenage daughter, apparently. Right across the New York Times editorial page from Nicolas Kristof’s column on the . . . . Continue Reading »
The Lutheran World Federation provides one of the sorriest examples of a press release I’ve seen in, oh, perhaps a week. The lead sentence (rambling on for thirty-nine words) starts off: A group of theologians, ethicists, anthropologists and staff working on adaptation and mitigation . . . . Continue Reading »
Long have I railed against the way the phrase ‘sense of’ has crept, like ragweed, into our daily discourse at every level. But this, from Gail Collins in conversation with David Brooks, is particularly egregious and illustrative: And I walked away from the whole drama with a sense that . . . . Continue Reading »
Hedonism—the scratching of every itch, indulgence of very impulse, breaking of nearly every norm—is very much central to our ongoing coup de culture that is replacing Judeo-Christian/Humanistic society with one based in utilitarianism/hedonism/radical environmentalism. Hedonism has . . . . Continue Reading »
The lexicon we use in discussing bioethical issues is important. And look how this newspaper does it in a poll to measure attitudes about refusing unwanted treatment. From the story:PATIENTS’ lives are being artificially “extended beyond what they actually want for themselves”, . . . . Continue Reading »
How long before we look back on the American ‘imperial age’ as a hiccup, a fling with power never really actualized, stabilized, or formalized? Christian Brose at Foreign Policy ‘s Shadow Government points us to Andrew Schearer writing yesterday in the Wall Street Journal : . . . . Continue Reading »
Gay activists have waited for the man they voted into office to throw them a bone, and none has come. So they’re going to start mounting the pressure for him to act, says the New York Times today. The article mentions that Obama could appoint a gay man or woman to fill Justice Souter’s . . . . Continue Reading »
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