From Pastor Gregory Alms:That line is one of my favorites in Luther’s great hymn, A Mighty Fortress is Our God. I always get a lump in my throat as I sing it. I stand a bit taller and thrust out my chest just a bit in defiance of enemies, spiritual and otherwise.But it is a curious moment. For . . . . Continue Reading »
From an address by Archbishop Charles Chaput at the Fifth Symposium Rome: Priests and Laity on Mission: Having said all this, we still face a problem. And here it is: God has never been more absent from the Western mind than he is today. Additionally, we live in an age when almost every scientific . . . . Continue Reading »
At NRO, Kathryn Jean Lopez posts an exchange between Unitarian minister Maryiln Sewell and atheist Christopher Hitchens: Maryiln Sewell: The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from . . . . Continue Reading »
Scientists have recently discovered a way to grow pork in a petri dish —a technique to turn pig stem cells into strips of meat that could one day offer a green alternative to raising livestock. Although in-vitro pork won’t be reaching supermarket shelves anytime soon, it’s not too . . . . Continue Reading »
Generally speaking, I’m a tolerant, live-and-let-live, kind of guy. But there are four types of people that drive me nuts: libertarians, hippies, bad dancers, and folks who pull goofy stunts in public for attention. So you can imagine my dismay when on midnight April 12, 2008, the eve of . . . . Continue Reading »
How does Obama’s first year State of the Union Address compare to other recent Presidents? Below are word clouds, based on the number of times a word was mentioned in the speech, for the first-year SOTUs of Reagan through Obama. Barack Obama (January 27, 2010) George W. Bush (January 29, . . . . Continue Reading »
And you thought this was an easy one. You thought being a “social conservative” meant some sort of combination of pro-life, pro-family, pro-fiscal responsibility, pro-original intent, and so forth. You thought that your faith was on the leading edge of this ethic. Well, do I have news for you. But it will have to wait just a few minutes. You see, there is some correction of history that we need to do.
History, it seems, has been playing a dirty little trick on us. No longer are the socialism (national and international) of Hitler and Stalin the products of the Marxist-Progressive movement. Castro was not a “progressive” and Mao did not represent the Leftist turn of the modern liberal movement. History is a real trickster. Just like the human-caused global warming “scientists” who have written away the Little Ice Age, a new breed of Leftist “historians” have written away the bloody heritage of the Left and assigned it to — you guessed it — the social conservative. Continue Reading »
(Note: This is part four in a series on the suicides of three detainees at Guantanamo Bay in 2006. The other posts are here, here , and here .) Rather than address the rebuttal in my last post, Andrew Sullivan has decided to take a different path in our debate over the Guantanamo Bay suicides : Joe . . . . Continue Reading »
Holy cow! Scientists have demonstrated that pluripotency may not be necessary to transform cells into other body tissues, meaning that “stem cells” might prove unnecessary in regenerative medicine. In mice, they transformed fibroblasts—cells that construct connective tissue . . . . Continue Reading »
Before we move too far beyond the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I thought I’d post one more thought about the subject. After I’d had my moment when babies became real (see my last post), I had an overlapping experience that greatly shaped my understanding of literature.While I teach . . . . Continue Reading »
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