Austin Stone

Thanks to Nathaniel for sending me this, a neat overview of master filmmaker Orson Welles’ career —with an eye toward his spiritual sympathies. “I try to be a Christian. [But] I don’t pray really, because I don’t want to bore God.” In fact, prayer was almost as . . . . Continue Reading »

Oklahoma’s Legislature has voted unanimously to outlaw all human cloning from the state, and prohibit the importation of the product of human cloning. From the story : Legislation to ban human cloning easily cleared both the House and the Senate on Friday and heads to the governor. House Bill . . . . Continue Reading »

"Where have you been, my blue-eyed son..?" Bob Dylan, A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall , 1963 Over at Credo Taylor Marshall does the good service of informing us that the Enlightened One has offered his first tithe to the all-knowing Demiurge in his recent reversal of the "Mexico . . . . Continue Reading »

So far, I’ve been reluctant to enter the torture debate. That’s not because it isn’t important (it is) or because I’m unsure of my views (I oppose torture). Rather, this issue has encouraged the tendency of the blogosphere to generate more heat than light. The public . . . . Continue Reading »

Mr. Deneen’s take (post just before this one) on the Inaugural is the most penetrating I’ve seen, or expect to see. The collusion between Kantianism and Machiavellianism is a very important insight, and in fact one that Harvey Mansfield has always seen very clearly (as in his . . . . Continue Reading »

A few days ago I saw the new Clint Eastwood movie Gran Torino which is ably reviewed by our own Peter Suderman here . Lots of critics have charged the movie, and Eastwood’s directorial efforts generally, with a kind of bleak nihilism that finds hope only in the heroic but feckless struggle . . . . Continue Reading »

Over at Upturned Earth, John Schwenkler has asked for an eighth-grade-level refresher course on what an r-squared value means . Given how prone to misinterpretation the correlation coefficient is, it’s a little bit easier to talk about what it doesn’t mean. This is also a useful . . . . Continue Reading »

 Over coffee this morning, I found that Razib Khan and Ross Douthat have started a lively little debate about the use and abuse of the term "Judeo-Christian". Khan argues that it’s little more than political correctness. In fact,   the dominant form of Judaism between . . . . Continue Reading »

  Does anyone out there really believe in “metaphysical neutrality” in the political realm, or, for that matter, in a purely “political” liberalism (later Rawls) that would be neutral with respect to understandings of the meaning of life, or of “the . . . . Continue Reading »

Bouncing off the point I make in that last post , I’ll present a conundrum: Why is it that the most humble people I know also tend to be the most violent (sometimes physically, more often intellectually)? Those friends of mine who are most skeptical of dogmatism (especially rationalism, the . . . . Continue Reading »