Amy Welborn also has some insightful things to say about E.J. Dionne and L’Osservatore Romano : One of the current memes, as we say, making its way through commentary on Obama/Notre Dame and Obama/American Catholics runs something like this: “The Pope and the Vatican don’t seem to . . . . Continue Reading »
Washington State’s assisted suicide controversy continues to burn. Articles keep coming out complaining that patients who legally qualify for help in killing themselves are being refused, while hospitals and physicians continue to exercise their right under the law to opt out. From the latest . . . . Continue Reading »
In his column today, Michael Gerson writes about a Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life event at which the sociologist Robert Putnam spoke. Putnam has written, with David Campbell, a book that will be released next year, American Grace: How Religion Is Reshaping Our Civic and Political Lives . The . . . . Continue Reading »
The times in which we live can be so disheartening: The swine flu—known in its politically correct name as H1N1 Flu—appears not to have become the deadly pandemic some feared. But rather than be relieved, some are carping that the government engaged in fear-mongering. From the story: Did . . . . Continue Reading »
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 »
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