I can remember when internet content presented itself to me as an unexpected bounty of thoughtful essays, articles, and shorter form stuff. There was a time when I read every single post at National Review’s The Corner (a blog started early in the last decade) and regularly checked in on the Instapundit. But it is possible to get too much of anything. And that is what has happened to me with internet media.

As I sit staring at a monitor and clicking away, I can feel time slipping away and my attention becoming less and less focused as I browse, browse, browse hopping quickly from place to place with one part of my conscious mind trying to generate ideas for the next skip.

Confronted with this sense of things more frequently, lately, I found myself suddenly vulnerable to an offer from Time which I would normally throw away. A year’s worth of Time (weekly!) for about $20. My typical reaction would be, “Great! The doctor’s office can have it.” But not on this occasion. Instead, I thought about how nice might it be to have one magazine broadly covering the news. I can easily take it to bed (or to the bathroom . . .), read through the articles, and feel like a reasonably informed person. It helped that I’d recently been on a radio show where the host stumped me by asking a question about the START treaty. My clicking had deftly avoided it. If I were to read Time, cover to cover, a small embarrassment of the sort would be less likely to happen.

So, now, I am two issues into the subscription. I don’t get up-to-the-second information, but I do get a publication of manageable size (rather than the near infinity of the net) and the coverage is comprehensive enough.

As far as one of the reasons I’d stopped reading magazines like Time, such as my perception of harsh media bias, I can report I have read little to put me on the defensive or to feel as though my point of view is being treated unfairly. Indeed, the only thing objectionable about these two issues has been an ad on the rear cover for the atheist version of The 700 Club, which is also known as Real Time with Bill Maher. There may be a reason Time has survived the black hole of failure that took hold of Newsweek.

To this point, I have to say the experiment is a success. If you are suffering with the sensation your soul is being sucked slowly into the machine, I recommend you give it a try.

My students and I have been discussing Aristotle’s political thought recently. Yesterday, our discussion centered around Aristotle’s insistence that the political association must be about more than the protection of rights (in essence a mutual defense alliance). Aristotle instead endorses civic friendship in which our lives are truly interwoven in pursuit of substantive justice.

As we talked, it occurred to me that President Obama ran as an Aristotelian in this sense. HE would be the one to lift us beyond our petty, individualistic concerns toward a higher vision of community justice. WE, upon joining him, would become the ones WE have been waiting for. Candidate Obama successfully pleaded his case for a left-of-center version of civic friendship.  President Obama has had a tough go of implementing it as the consequences become manifest.

All the way around the table, the students were skeptical of the possibility that a government can move from our current pluralism to unity around some vision. Instead, they seemed to prefer the idea that government sets fair rules and conditions for people to pursue their individual ends. Because my students are mostly Christians, I moved the example away from President Obama to a Christian republic in which people aren’t forced to be Christians but where Christian moral norms hold sway. They didn’t have much hope or enthusiasm for that, either. Or, at least, they thought it was equally impossible in our current culture.

I wonder if there is a clue here indicating to us the limits of an instrumentality like the state and pointing toward the possibilities of the church.

Many of us who are Christians and/or conservatives have enjoyed Russell Kirk’s books over the years.  Although The Conservative Mind gets most of the attention, I suspect some may have found The Roots of American Order to be a better read.  The difference is that The Conservative Mind is early scholarship that happened to hit just the right note at the time whereas The Roots of American Order is the wide-ranging reflection of a learned academic wise-man with a heck of a jazzy hook.  The Roots of American Order, it turns out, can be found in Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, and London.  It’s a wonderful way to start a book which is a fusion of historical and political analysis.

Neither of these volumes is Kirk’s best seller.

The all-time champion of the Kirk canon, supposedly outselling all the rest combined, is The Old House of Fear.  Quite a few conservatives know that Kirk wrote some ghost stories, but haven’t read them.  I took the plunge several months back and read Ancestral Shadows, which is a fantastic collection of his stories offered by Eerdmans.  You can read that review here.

The publisher recently sent me The Old House of Fear so I could read Kirk’s novel length entry in the supernatural story genre.  Having finished the book, I can again express satisfaction with Kirk’s handiwork.  The novel features a good plot and a excellent character study.  A wealthy old man wants to buy land on a semi-inaccessible Scottish Isle, but has a terrible time pulling it off despite his fantastic means.  He hires a military veteran turned lawyer to travel there and find a way to make the purchase happen.  Events unfold in an exciting manner from that point.  The veteran/lawyer character is wonderfully drawn.  He is in his late 30′s, single, physically sturdy, resourceful and somewhat wasted in legal practice.  Part of what makes the book work is our desire to see what this complex man will do as he encounters obstacles.  The villains are well established, too.  And fairly creepy.

When you have that open weekend when you want to spend time in your favorite chair reading a good book, the kind you can just enjoy instead of alertly marking up and taking notes, I highly recommend The Old House of Fear and Ancestral Shadows.

I’ve been reading through Eric Metaxas’ biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It is truly excellent. At points it almost has a dreamlike quality. I highly recommend it.

What motivates this post is the point in the narrative where the German state church is confronted by the Aryan Paragraph designed to prohibit Jews (Christian Jews!) from membership in the German church. The point of the exercise was to sharpen the contrast between Jewishness and Germanness.  Bonhoeffer and others, aghast at this turn of events, begin to develop an interest in the concept of a free church. The free church is the idea of the church as a regenerate body (voluntary) instead of a comprehensive one (coextensive with the political community).

This part of the book caught my interest because it perfectly captures the theme I’ve been pushing for a while now which is that Christians should aggressively push for separation of church and state while drawing a sharp line between separation and secularism. Separation means the state does not fund the church nor does it control the church. Separation does not mean the church refrains from engaging in advocacy or organization (political or otherwise). One of the primary features of separation is that it should free the church to criticize or applaud the state depending on the degree to which it pursues an unholy agenda or a more righteous one.

In other words, a regenerate church is not a private church. It is rather like a volunteer army. Members enlist for a mission to the world.

My good friend and a thinker I admire greatly, Pejman Yousefzadeh, has read my book The End of Secularism and commented on it.  I am very happy to have him read it because he is one of the few non-Christians of whom I am aware who have read the book.

Because I value his opinion so highly, I feel I must take a moment to correct what I think is a misperception on his part.  In his short review of the book over at The New Ledger, he essentially defends First Amendment religion clause jurisprudence from my historical attack.  At the root, because I argue the clause did not mean at the founding what it has come to mean today, he thinks I am saying the current construction has no basis.   I want to be clear that I am not going that far.

Instead, I simply argue that the debate over whether the founding was Christian, deist, secular, or whatever is not relevant to the interpretation of the religion clauses because  they do not set forth a substantive theory of religious freedom.  My point is that we have so much trouble divining a substantive theory from the clauses because they were not written to accomplish what they use them to achieve.  Steven D. Smith has written more and better than me on that point.  And he is simply correct.  I don’t think there is much getting around it.

Certainly, you can argue that there is another way to read the constitution to reach the result we currently have, but it does not rise directly from the text of the First Amendment if you have any interest in original intent at all.

My children, Andrew and Grace, are now ages 7 and 4.  According to my wife, they have been prime candidates for a trip to Disney World for some time now.  I have held back because I tend not to be enthusiastic about vacations for reasons other than visiting family (because that’s how I grew up) and because I have believed I would end up dragging tired children across a crowded theme park.  We compromised on a Disney cruise to the Bahamas and Disney’s own island Castaway Cay and spent the last week on the trip.

Disney is obviously a hugely important cultural institution.  They own ABC, ESPN, Pixar, and Marvel comics in addition to their own massive empire of Disney-branded properties.  So, I took care to observe the way they did things, the messages they sent, etc.

Some of it was obvious.  ”You can do it!  Your dreams can come true!  Never give up!”  Some of the messages were a little more mature.  ”Always maintain an appreciation for the sublime in life.  Never lose the best part of  your childlike nature.  Maintain hope even until the end.  Good things can . . . will happen to you.”

Those were traditional parts of the Disney message.   I appreciated them.

The part that was less edifying was the evolution of all the Disney characters, including the famed princesses, into celebrities.  At various points in the day, Disney characters stand in the grand foyer of the ship and pose with a long line of kids and adults.  Some of the kids get autographs.  Even my son, Andrew, who is usually dismissive (in a way I don’t like) of “a guy in a suit” was captured by it.  We got lots of photos of our kids posing.  Of course, there is no shortage of that in other parts of the culture.  How many have been to offices filled with “grip and grin” photos of the occupant with various famed personages?  Standing next to a famous person = joy.

But I want to praise Disney for something special.  What I saw on this cruise was a company incredibly solicitous of children and adults with special needs.  My dinner table was surrounded on both sides by tables filled with adults and/or teens with Down Syndrome or other forms of retardation.  They seemed to enjoy the cruise immensely.  One young woman wore a pink princess gown most times I saw her with her mother.  Her outfit seemed entirely appropriate in the grand dining rooms of the ship.

My pleasure at this state of affairs was lessened somewhat by the dawning realization that everyone I saw with Down Syndrome was a teenager or older.  That reminded me of the startling statistics revealing the very high incidence of abortion when parents discover an unborn child might have the disorder.  The last number I saw was over 80%.  Eugenics is far from dead.  Voluntary destruction of babies who might have Down Syndrome is likely to prove far more effective than government plans ever did.  The church must do a better job of preparing adults for the gut-check moments of that type.  Escape is always easier.

On another front, I felt Disney did an excellent job providing for families with children in wheelchairs.  There were many of them, too.  My son Andrew has very little social reticence.  Sighting a boy with no hair in a reclining wheelchair-like apparatus, I pointed him out to Andrew and suggested he might like to say hello.  Andrew, predictably for his nature, walked right up to the boy and offered a greeting.  Usually, though, Andrew would begin rattling on without paying attention to the other person at all.  This time, Andrew was a little in awe.  He looked at the little boy and didn’t say anything.  The parents and I began talking.  We discovered their boy was eight.  Close in age to Andrew.  ”Did you hear that, Andrew?  He might be in second grade just like you.”  The parents told me their boy was being held back in second grade.  Their weary smiles made think about saints.  Andrew and I went on after wishing them well.  I hoped to see them again, but we didn’t.

Now, I know that Disney is a giant corporation churning out content as part of the relentless steamroller of the international commercial system.  But for those children with special needs (a good turn of phrase, so much better than its predecessors) whom I saw on the cruise, the Disney/Pixar message probably resonates like a sonic boom.  ”Good things can and will happen to you.  Never give up.  Somewhere inside you there is a prince or princess who deserves respect even though you’ve had none until now.”