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.