On the Square Today

Wesley J. Smith on freedom of worship’s assault on freedom of religion :

What’s the difference? Under freedom of worship, the Catholic and Orthodox churches both remain perfectly free to teach that the Eucharistic bread and wine transform into the body and blood of Christ. Muslims can continue to require women to be segregated from men at the mosque. But outside worship contexts, the state may compel the faithful to violate their faith by acting in accord with secular morality rather than consistently with their dogmatic precepts.

Also today, John Wilson on Ray Bradbury, the pedestrian :

Why didn’t Bradbury drive? In 2011, the University of Illinois Press published a fascinating book by Jonathan R. Eller,  Becoming Ray Bradbury . Eller, the co-founder of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, probably knows more about Bradbury than any other living person. Oddly, in a book that leans heavily toward the psychological, Eller touches only glancingly on the subject. He repeats, in passing, the lore about Bradbury’s “abiding fear of automobiles—the multiple-fatality accident he had witnessed shortly after moving to Los Angeles in 1934 remained a recurring nightmare.”