Question: Which presidential candidate has a son who served in Iraq? Further question: Why doesn’t he talk about it? For the answers, see this editorial in the Jerusalem Post.

Shopping for light summer reading is like shopping for desserts in a supermarket. Most books are unfortunately like Hostess twinkies, but if you look hard enough you can find a nice crème brûlée or a tarte aux framboises. (Okay, it’s like shopping in a Manhattan supermarket, but we digress.) In that latter category we can put most of the works of P.G. Wodehouse, a man whose prose is as perfect and fine as it is frivolous. I recently read one of his earliest books, Something Fresh, and I can’t recall laughing at a book more loudly and in more public places in recent memory.

So, if you’re looking for fluffy, yummy summer reading, you might want to visit or revisit Wodehouse. And if you have to intellectualize him, read Joseph Bottum’s “God & Bertie Wooster” from our October 2005 issue.

David Warren gives us the latest on Mark Steyn and the Canadian human rights courts:

As was perfunctorily reported on Thursday, the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission, one of three HRCs to which Islamists took Maclean’s magazine for having published Mark Steyn, has self-protectively dismissed the case before it could come to tribunal. The Ontario HRC had previously dismissed it: but with an outrageous statement from its chief commissioner, Barbara Hall, to the effect that Maclean’s was guilty of publishing “hate,” nonetheless. She regretted that her commission had no mandate to try the case, but looked forward to a time when this mandate would be extended. . . .

All of the complainant’s expenses are paid by the taxpayer, as well as all of the overheads and expenses of the jet-setting “human rights” bureaucrats, who do all the prosecutorial work, as well as providing both judge and jury. The system is, in principle, indistinguishable from that in place during the Cultural Revolution in Maoist China. It was perpetrated by leftwing activists on the Canadian people while they were sleeping. It is a system of the activists, by the activists, and for the activists. . . .

Given what has already occurred, it is not enough to simply fire the people responsible for specific abuses. The Human Rights Code must be rewritten to eliminate future challenges to free speech and press, and the HRCs themselves taken down. The very notion that “your freedom ends when I begin to feel offended” must be shown for what it is: totalitarian flotsam in the foetid swamp of “politically correct thought.”

The full text of the article, which first appeard in the Ottowa Citizen, is reproduced on Real Clear Politics.

The Rev. Sam L. Ruteikara, co-chair of Uganda’s National AIDS-Prevention Committee, writes in today’s Washington Post:

But will the money allocated for AIDS stop the spread of the virus in sub-Saharan Africa, where 76 percent of the world’s HIV-AIDS deaths occurred last year?

Not if the dark dealings I’ve witnessed in Africa continue unchecked. In the fight against AIDS, profiteering has trumped prevention. AIDS is no longer simply a disease; it has become a multibillion-dollar industry.

In the late 1980s, before international experts arrived to tell us we had it all “wrong,” we in Uganda devised a practical campaign to prevent the spread of HIV. We recognized that population-wide AIDS epidemics in Africa were driven by people having sex with more than one regular partner. Therefore, we urged people to be faithful. Our campaign was called ABC (Abstain, or Be Faithful, or use Condoms), but our main message was: Stick to one partner. We promoted condoms only as a last resort.

Because we knew what to do in our country, we succeeded. The proportion of Ugandans infected with HIV plunged from 21 percent in 1991 to 6 percent in 2002. But international AIDS experts who came to Uganda said we were wrong to try to limit people’s sexual freedom. Worse, they had the financial power to force their casual-sex agendas upon us.

PEPFAR calls for Western experts to work as equal partners with African leaders on AIDS prevention. But as co-chair of Uganda’s National AIDS-Prevention Committee, I have seen this process sabotaged. Repeatedly, our 25-member prevention committee put faithfulness and abstinence into the National Strategic Plan that guides how PEPFAR money for our country will be spent. Repeatedly, foreign advisers erased our recommendations. When the document draft was published, fidelity and abstinence were missing.

He continues:

International suppliers make broad, oversimplified statements such as “You can’t change Africans’ sexual behavior.” While it’s true that you can’t change everybody, you don’t have to. If the share of men having three or more sexual partners in a year drops from 15 percent to 3 percent, as happened in Uganda between 1989 and 1995, HIV infection rates will plunge. It is that simple.

We, the poor of Africa, remain silenced in the global dialogue. Our wisdom about our own culture is ignored.

Telling men and women to keep sex sacred — to save sex for marriage and then remain faithful — is telling them to love one another deeply with their whole hearts. Most HIV infections in Africa are spread by sex outside of marriage: casual sex and infidelity. The solution is faithful love.

So hear my plea, HIV-AIDS profiteers. Let my people go. We understand that casual sex is dear to you, but staying alive is dear to us. Listen to African wisdom, and we will show you how to prevent AIDS.

Read the entire piece. (Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?)

“When I get up in the night… I sing and I paint. Sometimes I go out to look at the stars and the moon. So I sing. I come back here maybe at 2:00 during the night. Then I start painting. . . . It is a prayer for me to paint.” —Sr. Magnificat

For a delightful glimpse into the work of a modern-day icon painter, or icon writer as they are properly called, see here.

Christine Rosen reflects on the passing of Harriet McBryde Johnson:

When Harriet McBryde Johnson died earlier this month at the age of 50 from a congenital neuromuscular disease, obituaries called her a “disability-rights activist.” This is far too narrow a description of her life. She was less a traditional activist than an acute social conscience. Ms. Johnson forced us to look at disability in a different way — not as something that we should seek to eradicate, but as something that is integral to the human condition, a “natural part of the human experience,” as the American Association of People With Disabilities puts it.

Ms. Johnson, a lawyer, first earned national attention when she debated philosopher Peter Singer at Princeton University in 2003, an experience she wrote about for the New York Times Magazine. Thankfully free of the ponderous cant that infects so much of bioethics, she was brutally direct when she talked about disabilities, including her own. “Most people don’t know how to look at me,” she wrote, describing her severely twisted spine and her “jumble of bones in a floppy bag of skin.” But she abhorred the “veneer of beneficence” that overlay the arguments of those who said she would be “better off” without her disability. “The presence or absence of a disability doesn’t predict quality of life,” she argued, challenging Mr. Singer’s support of what she called “disability-based infanticide.”

A bit more:

Although they never formed formal alliances (and Not Dead Yet takes no position on prebirth issues, such as genetic selection), Ms. Johnson and her fellow activists often found themselves on the same side of the ramparts as conservative Christians: Not Dead Yet marshaled the support of 25 national disability groups to oppose the attempts of Terry Schiavo’s husband to “starve and dehydrate her to death,” for example, and defended congressional efforts to intervene in the case. As Diane Coleman, president of Not Dead Yet, told a group in Tampa, Fla., during the Schiavo controversy: “Surely, it will not be argued that the National Spinal Cord Injury Association, the National Down Syndrome Congress, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund and all the rest are now or ever have been puppets of religious conservatives.” Indeed, Ms. Johnson, an atheist, once chastised Mr. Singer for describing his enemies as a monolith of religious faithful focused solely on “the sanctity of human life.”

What Ms. Johnson’s life and the organizations she worked with demonstrate is that the convenient categories we often invoke to discuss these issues — secular or religious, liberal or conservative — can obscure as much as clarify, and that the culture benefits from hearing arguments from advocates of both secular and faith-based perspectives. Ms. Johnson’s description of Mr. Singer’s philosophy — “it is all about allowing as many individuals as possible to fulfill as many of their preferences as possible” — could be the slogan of our impatient, technologically sophisticated age. And both conservative Christians and secular disability-rights activists have capably criticized this devotion to extreme individualism.

In many ways, the truths that Ms. Johnson forced us to confront are easier to dismiss when they come from so-called right-wing religious nuts. Ms. Johnson, with her experience of disability and her commitment to liberal principles, made people far more uncomfortable. Her critique challenged our cultural assumptions about disability. How accepting are we, really, of those who are not able-bodied? “The peculiar drama of my life has placed me in a world that by and large thinks it would be better if people like me did not exist,” she wrote. “My fight has been for accommodation, the world to me and me to the world.” Yet, despite the lip service we pay to “accommodation” (and the genuine good that comes from legislation such as the Americans With Disabilities Act), we now find ourselves in a disturbing situation: As our scientific powers to eliminate disability grow, our acceptance of disability wanes.

The entire piece is worth reading.

Here is a link to the New York Times Magazine piece she wrote. The opening:

He insists he doesn’t want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was, and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened.

Whenever I try to wrap my head around his tight string of syllogisms, my brain gets so fried it’s . . . almost fun. Mercy! It’s like ”Alice in Wonderland.”

It is a chilly Monday in late March, just less than a year ago. I am at Princeton University. My host is Prof. Peter Singer, often called — and not just by his book publicist — the most influential philosopher of our time. He is the man who wants me dead. No, that’s not at all fair. He wants to legalize the killing of certain babies who might come to be like me if allowed to live. He also says he believes that it should be lawful under some circumstances to kill, at any age, individuals with cognitive impairments so severe that he doesn’t consider them ”persons.” What does it take to be a person? Awareness of your own existence in time. The capacity to harbor preferences as to the future, including the preference for continuing to live.

At this stage of my life, he says, I am a person. However, as an infant, I wasn’t. I, like all humans, was born without self-awareness. And eventually, assuming my brain finally gets so fried that I fall into that wonderland where self and other and present and past and future blur into one boundless, formless all or nothing, then I’ll lose my personhood and therefore my right to life. Then, he says, my family and doctors might put me out of my misery, or out of my bliss or oblivion, and no one count it murder.

The New Republic is up in arms at the latest Catholic League press release.

At her Washington Post / Newsweek site “On Faith,” Sally Quinn wrote about attending the funeral Mass for Tim Russert:

“Last Wednesday I was determined to take it [the Eucharist] for Tim, transubstantiation notwithstanding. I’m so glad I did. It made me feel closer to him. And it was worth it just to imagine how he would have loved it.”

Quinn hasn’t liked the response her publicizing this (remember, the Mass was private) has received:

I’m baffled by the reaction, and completely blindsided,” Quinn said. “I’m very pluralistic about religion, and I feel that everyone should respect everyone else’s.” Then she continued, talking about Russert:

I was really close to him, and I was grieving. And I thought me taking the Eucharist would be a thing that he would really enjoy. And all these things are what religion should be about. … There’s no sign out there that says you’re not allowed to take Communion. [The Catholic Church is] like, “Everyone is welcome. This is God’s house.” God doesn’t turn people away, supposedly.

I think it’s really an important issue. The Pope doesn’t want people who are pro-choice to take it. John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Chris Dodd, even the mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, and others were not allowed. … Frankly, none of that was going through my mind. I was feeling absolutely destroyed. It felt right to do it as a tribute to him. I wasn’t thinking politically at all.

I’ve become a champion of pluralism and a spirit of inclusiveness. Any religious people who purport to be Christians, or whatever faith you might be, would do everything they could to welcome others–in the case of Catholics, to welcome others the way Christ would welcome others. This is a perfect example of WWJD. Would Jesus have said, “No you don’t, Sally Quinn. You’re not going to get away with this one!”

“Baffled” and “blindsided?” “There’s no sign out there that says you’re not allowed to take Communion. [The Catholic Church is] like, ‘Everyone is welcome. This is God’s house.’”

This coming from a religion journalist.

“I’m very pluralistic about religion, and I feel that everyone should respect everyone else’s.”

For Sally Quinn, respecting all religions apparently means all religions must respect all of Sally Quinn’s religious choices. She needn’t respect a religious community’s desire that only those in communion with Christ and His Church receive the sacrament of communion.

A few days ago, Amanda Shaw wrote about the Cistercian monks of the Sift Heiligenkruz whose chant CD hits US stores on Tuesday. Today’s New York Times had a nice article on their life.

A reader writes in and notes the striking similarities between Mr. Bottum and Mr. Spock.

Robert George, Joseph Bottum, Robert Wilken, Richard John Neuhaus

After this year’s board meetings, several of us gathered for . . . well, a hootenanny, I guess you’d have to call it. Little did we know that our junior fellow Nathaniel Peters used his camera to record some snippets—which would have been a disaster, except that Robby George can actually play. Here he is, for instance, playing the theme from Deliverance:

Mostly, though, the evening was more fun than competent, and several people suggested that our friends might like to see the results. Here’s the whole gang, with Hadley Arkes joining in, on the Dolly Parton song “Coat of Many Colors”:

Turns out that our assistant editor Ryan Anderson is very good on the hammer dulcimer, a tuned percussion instrument he bought recently because his marimbas and vibraphones don’t fit in a New York apartment. Here is a snippet from his rendition of the William Butler Yeats song “Down by the Salley Gardens”:

And, for a laugh, here’s “Shootin’ with Rasputin” on the autoharp:

People often ask what life in New York is like these days. Now you know. Or at least you know how it is when the geniuses of First Things take time off from their monumental labors.

Kathy Barr, Robert George, Joseph Bottum, Russell Hittinger, George Weigel, David Novak

If I remember correctly, it was an Anglican, Bishop Ussher, who added up the ages of the patriarchs in the Old Testament to arrive at the astonishingly precise date of Creation: 4004 B.C.—September 21, 4004 B.C.

The reading of ancient texts for clues about the calendar has a venerable tradition, in other words—and though it’s usually nutty, it’s always fun. Comes now a pair of astronomers who claim, in the pages of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, that they’ve identified the date on which Odysseus threw off his disguise and took his revenge on Penelope’s suitors in Ithaca.

Turns out Homer actually gives a lot of information on the positions of the stars and the orbits of the planets. Enough, anyway, that a little creativity could narrow things down—to April 16, 1178 B.C., in fact. Just in case you wanted to know the day that wily Odysseus took his bow and sent an arrow flying.

When Pope Benedict visited the Cistercian monks of Heiligenkreuz last fall, he praised them for their prayer that is “free of any useful purpose.” I’ve never thought of prayer in precisely these terms, but it’s worth reflection.

The recent update to the Pew Forum survey on religion in America tallied prayer efficacy, based on denomination. Historically black churches rank the highest, with 34 percent of members reporting having their prayers answered at least once a week. Evangelicals fall close behind at 29 percent, and Catholics and Mainline protestants trail at 15 and 14 percent, respectively. Jews and “unaffiliated,” it seems, come in last, with 8 percent of each receiving frequent answers to their prayers.

Of course, God can’t answer if we don’t ask; the efficacy and frequency of prayer are closely correlated. Almost 80 percent of historically black church members and Evangelicals pray every day, while only 58 percent of Catholics and 53 percent of Mainline protestants do. Jews and unaffiliated again lag behind, at 26 and 22 percent.

In short, crunch the numbers and you’ll find where the effort-response odds are best. If you want to chose a denomination based on the likelihood that your prayers will be answered, historically black churches still rank first with an impressive batting average of .425, with Evangelicals and (surprisingly) unaffiliated believers coming in next at .372 and .363. (Jews–.307, Mainline–.264, and Catholics–.259.)

So much for the numbers. The Cistercian monks, whose entire lives are dedicated to prayer, do not seek answers at all. They are the special forces of the spiritual life—armed with the Psalter in the regiments of the choir stalls—but storming heaven with petitions is not on their mission statement.

“Free of any useful purpose,” the pope said of their prayer, and one of the monks explained: “That is to say, we don’t pray for health or success or such things, rather we praise God simply because He is good. We do this on behalf of the whole of creation, and especially for all men and women, most especially those who have lost sight of the final horizon of their lives. We monks pray for the Church and for the whole world; that is our service, our duty, our office or officium.”

Thus, their prayer is not the source of God’s love and blessing; it is the overflowing of that love freely bestowed on our hearts. True prayer, one might say, is God’s blessing. “Happy are they who dwell in your house!” chants King David, and the Cistercian monks with him. “For ever they are praising you.” (Ps. 83:5)

Batting average?–infinity over zero.

In the latest issue of the Weekly Standard, I review three new academic books on enhancement biotechnology. I found the books a bit underwhelming… But reading through them and noting their deficiencies served as the catalyst for the articles I co-authored with Chris Tollefsen for First Things and The New Atlantis—where we tried to present a more adequate grounding for the discussion.

Here’s the opening of the review:

Imagine it’s 1900, and you’re a bioethicist. Of course, “bioethics” didn’t exist back in 1900–we had real academic disciplines in those days–but play along: You’re sitting on a presidential bioethics commission, and scientists show up to testify that a new thing called vaccination could increase life spans by 30 years. Would you judge vaccination unethical? Would you worry about “potentially devastating impacts on the economy, family, and generational relationships”?

If you wouldn’t have objected back in 1900, then you can’t object in 2008 to the changes being offered by biotechnology. Or so claims Ronald Green in Babies by Design. According to Green, those who object to some of today’s biotechnological innovations are engaged in “status-quo bias rather than reasoned reflection.” Reasoned reflection, according to Green, tells us to make “deliberate interventions in our own and our children’s genetic markup–to both prevent disease and enhance human life.”

Consider another thought experiment. What would have happened had our ape ancestors, millennia ago, decided that their genome was best and did what they could to preserve it, preventing further enhancement? If we don’t think the ape genome was best, why should we think our current genome is best?

This just-suppose device appears in John Harris’s Enhancing Evolution, another new volume which insists that concerns about the possibly dehumanizing effects of some biotechnologies are unwarranted. Harris asks, why wait for Mother Nature to improve us? Why not improve ourselves? Indeed, he argues, “there is a positive moral duty to enhance.” He longs for the day when we replace “natural selection with deliberate selection, Darwinian evolution with ‘enhancement evolution’” and anyone who thinks otherwise is “like our imagined ape ancestor who … thought evolution had gone far enough.”

Yet another new book, Russell Korobkin’s Stem Cell Century, uses the same device. In it, the dean of the Harvard Medical School tells Korobkin that stem cell therapies “have the potential to do for chronic diseases what antibiotics did for infectious diseases.” If you don’t object to penicillin, then you can’t object to the coming “penicillin for Parkinson’s.” Phrased like that, who could object?

There’s something revealing in these new books. They all argue that we have a moral imperative to enhance ourselves, and none of them seriously confronts the concerns that many thoughtful people have about the moral hazards of trying to design a more perfect human. They want to keep the technologies safe and their applications just, to be sure; but they consider these challenges to be easily surmountable. It’s as if we’ve discovered unqualified human goods. Or as Harris puts it, “enhancements are so obviously good for us that it is odd that the idea of enhancement has caused, and still occasions, so much suspicion, fear, and outright hostility.”

John Harris is no fringe figure. He’s professor of bioethics at the University of Manchester and editor in chief of the prestigious Journal of Medical Ethics. Green, too, belongs to the mainstream. He is a Dartmouth ethics professor and the founding director of the NIH’s Office of Genome Ethics. Korobkin has fewer obvious credentials–admitting on his website that he’s been researching stem cells only “for the last two years”–but he is a respectable professor at the respected UCLA School of Law.

Read the rest here.

Three years ago, the Supreme Court handed down its atrocious Kelo decision, which allowed local governments to take private land if they believed it could be developed in a way advantageous to the local economy. Steven Malanga reviews the results on Real Clear Markets:

Most Americans object to such takings because the intended uses of the land don’t justify violating property rights when the owner is unwilling to sell to government. But as [Jane] Jacobs observed, another important objection is that government planners often do a lousy job of anticipating the marketplace when they take property to be developed into something new. What I call mega-project ‘state capitalism,’ the grandiose schemes of politicians and their planners to invest public money in big projects like stadiums, downtown super-malls, and subsidized entertainment districts, has been on the rise for years, often with disastrous results which should have given the Supreme Court justices pause before they gave their blessings to seizures that “provide appreciable benefits to the community.”

Indeed, the very redevelopment project that sparked the Kelo lawsuit, an effort by the town of New London, Ct., to turn its Fort Trumbull waterfront into a haven for high-priced homes and 21st century jobs, has sputtered. The ground where Susette Kelo’s home stood is now barren, because the townhouses that the city-sponsored developer was supposed to build there have never gone up. Interest in the area isn’t very great and the developer hasn’t been able to get financing. In fact, what began more than a decade ago as an extravagant ‘public-private’ scheme to redevelop this whole area around tourism, research and development and luxury residential uses has produced little except ongoing construction on a $17 million Coast Guard station. . . .

Today, three years after Kelo, the game of public sponsored economic development subsidized by taxes, tax-free bonds, tax-breaks for favored businesses, and the threat of eminent domain, is alive and well, supporting everything from mega-projects like the massive 22-acre Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, N.Y., to the efforts by the tiny California town of Hercules to take land away from Wal-Mart because the town fathers objected to the big box retailer invading their domain. Kelo has allowed local officials throughout the country to remain masters of eminent domain, and private markets continue to suffer as a result.

“Deep within everyone’s heart, whether he knows it or not, is a yearning for supreme happiness and thus, ultimately, for God. Such a primordial human longing for completion is fulfilled by a monastery where the community gathers several times a day for the praise of God.”

So said Pope Benedict XVI, on his visit last fall to the ancient Cistercian monastery of the Holy Cross, Stift Heiligenkreuz, in Austria’s Vienna woods. The large stone abbey, a blend of Gothic and Romanesque architecture, has been a site of unbroken prayer since its founding in 1133 by St. Leopold III. In the nine hundred years since, the abbey has endured the Reformation, French Revolution, two world wars–and recent decades have brought a resurgence in monastic vocations, with nearly eighty monks now gathered together in the austere but joyous tradition of ora et labora. (Spectacular pictures here and here.)

The monks maintain some eighteen parishes as well as a Pontifical Theological Academy, but the primary apostolate of the order is prayer and praise of God, specifically in communal chanting of the Divine Office. Prayer is not just part of their schedule, a five-times-a-day punctuation of their daily work. Rather, prayer is their schedule, their rhythm, their purpose, their life.

But what does all this have to do with the Marthas of the world, with those busied by many things? Or, more radically, what does it have to do with those who have never seen the Lord’s face–and never even thought to look?

A great deal, if we are to believe pop music charts in the U.K. By luck–or grace—the Heiligenkreuz Cistercians were surprised with a Universal Music recording contract last winter, and they released an album, Chant: Music for Paradise, this May. Within a week, their album was among the top ten for British pop-music sales. Said HMV spokesman Gennaro Castaldo, “Monastic chanting has to be the ultimate chill music.”

That’s one way to put it. Or, as Cistercian Abbot Gregor Henckel Donnersmark observed: “When the monks sing, the chant opens our hearts. We hope it purifies our souls and helps us regain charity, light, strength, and peace. Where there is chaos, we seek to restore order. Where there is emptiness, we try to find meaning. And where there is sadness, joy can return.”

“Gregorian chant is our prayer,” added Father Karl Wallner, O.Cist. “The music not only calms, it also gives strength. It is as though one crosses a spiritual border and leaves the superficial world behind. Gregorian chant opens the heart for God.”

But prosaic description only goes so far; to be understood, sacred music needs to be heard, needs to be prayed. Deep within everyone’s heart, whether he knows it or not . . . “

The Washington Post has a review of The Lolita Effect, a book that focuses on the sexualization of young girls and asks what can be done about it. Based on the review, the book is solid when it comes to showing how this early sexualization hurts young girls and produces other social ills (child pornography, rape, eating disorders, etc). But it’s interesting to see what happens when the author looks for an alternative to the hypersexualized culture. If we’re going to replace this culture, we’ll need a clear, coherent, and reasoned proposal for what human sexuality should be. Jennifer Ruark, the reviewer, writes:

From her first sentence (”The Lolita Effect begins with the premise that children are sexual beings”) to numerous descriptions of herself as “pro-sex” and “pro-media,” Durham takes pains to show that she is no prude or censor. But she sees a vast gulf between healthy female sexuality and the one dictated by “hooker chic,” which is all about turning boys on with the public display of girls’ bodies (thin, of course, yet voluptuous). Why, Durham asks, can’t girls’ sexuality be about their own pleasure? And why must teenage girls, in particular, live in fear of slipping over the delicate line “between acceptable hotness and unacceptable sluttiness”? Girls should be allowed to say no to virginity pledges and to “Girls Gone Wild,” Durham argues. But she does not develop a clear definition of healthy sexuality, beyond describing it as “inclusive, diverse, and affirming” and unyoked from commerce (emphasis mine).

The University of Louisville had a contract with Duke University for a series of four football games over the course of a few years, but Duke pulled out of the series after the first game. Whereupon, Louisville sued for $450,000—pointing out, quite reasonably, that the contract between the schools called for a penalty of $150,000 per game, “if a date with a ‘team of similar stature’ could not be arranged.”

Louisville, however, lost its lawsuit, for the lawyers from Duke showed up in court and argued that “the Blue Devils, which have a record of 6-45 over the past five seasons, were so bad that any team would be a suitable replacement.” As the judge observed in his decision, “At oral argument, Duke (with a candor perhaps more attributable to good legal strategy than to institutional modesty) persuasively asserted that this is a threshold that could not be any lower. Duke’s argument on this point cannot be reasonably disputed by Louisville.”

It’s a legal strategy that has, one imagines, many other useful applications.

(Hat Tip: Eugene Volokh)

You are the Democratic candidate for president. You want to reach out to Catholics. So what do you do when the majority of the elected officials on your National Catholic Advisory Council have the seal of approval from NARAL Pro-Choice America?

Bill McGurn explains in his Wall Street Journal column.

Nathaniel Peters has a nice review as this week’s “Book of the Week” for Books and Culture. Here’s how John Wilson, the editor of B&C, describes it:

Our current Book of the Week is Mystics, by William Harmless, reviewed by Nathaniel Peters, who commends it as a lucid guide to a subject that has occasioned a good deal of muddle and flimflam. Nathaniel is a junior fellow at First Things, where—in addition to publishing a very fine magazine—they send a steady stream of interns and fellows (of both sexes) out into the public square.

And here are Nathaniel’s opening two paragraphs:

The word mystic does not bring to mind edifying images for most Christians these days. It smacks of a vapid, Southern California mindset, readily exploited by marketers of tea and juice and such. For the more historically minded, mystic might suggest the wild-haired, unwashed visionaries off in the wilderness—not, in other words, something of much concern to everyday believers as they balance their finances or play catch with their kids.

But true mystics are far from amorphously spiritual. As Bernard McGinn has put it, “no mystic (at least before the present century) believed in or practiced ‘mysticism.’ They believed in and practiced Christianity (or Judaism, or Islam, or Hinduism), that is, religions that contained mystical elements as part of a wider historical whole.” McGinn’s work serves as the starting point for William Harmless, a professor of theology at Creighton University, whose new book Mystics is a walk through the lives and teachings of eight great mystics: Thomas Merton, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard of Bingen, Bonaventure, Meister Eckhart, and Evagrius Ponticus from the Christian tradition, as well as the Sufi poet Rumi and the Buddhist divine Dogen.

Yesterday we celebrated the feast of Sts. Thomas More and John Fisher, sixteenth-century English martyrs. I was reminded of this powerful passage from Robert Bolt’s play, A Man for All Seasons, the basis of the acclaimed film. Bolt, I think it interesting to add, was neither a Catholic nor a recusant-sympathizer, and the actions of his Thomas More often seem admirable not for their prudent fidelity to the moral good, but for their strident fidelity to his own conscience. Here, though, we glimpse something deeper in More—more than the stubborn Tudor statesman, more than shrewd humanist lawyer, more than the self-fashioned Renaissance individual. Here we glimpse “the king’s faithful servant, but God’s first”:

MORE You want me to swear to the Act of Succession?

MARGARET “God more regards the thoughts of the heart than the words of the mouth.” Or so you’ve always told me.

MORE Yes.

MARGARET Then say the words of the oath and in your heart think otherwise.

MORE What is an oath then but words we say to God?

MARGARET That’s very neat.

MORE Do you mean it isn’t true?

MARGARET No, it’s true.

MORE Then it’s a poor argument to call it “neat,” Meg. When a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. (He cups his hands) And if he opens his fingers then-he needn’t hope to find himself again. Some men aren’t capable of this, but I’d be loathe to think your father one of them.

MARGARET In any State that was half good, you would be raised up high, not here, for what you’ve done already. It’s not your fault the State’s three-quarters bad. Then if you elect to suffer for it, you elect yourself a hero.

MORE That’s very neat. But look now . . . If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we’d live like animals or angels in the happy land that needs no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all . . . why then perhaps we must stand fast a little-even at the risk of being heroes.

MARGARET (Emotionally) But in reason! Haven’t you done as much as God can reasonably want?

MORE Well . . . finally . . . it isn’t a matter of reason; finally it’s a matter of love.

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