Bad News, Good News
by James PoulosSomething to lift Rod out of his necrosexual funk : urban chickens have hit Drudge . . . . . Continue Reading »
A Darwinian Telos. What Faith!
by James PoulosAndrew has a fairly careful and modest essay at the Times on the progress of religious faith in the face of scientific progress. The issue of whether faith should gird us to not fear scientific truth is an intriguing one; the Holocaust was scientifically true, after all, meaning the facts could not . . . . Continue Reading »
Miscellaneous Stuff
by Robert CheeksJackson died this day, one hundred and forty-six years ago. He was thirty-nine years old, a kid for crying out loud, and to have accomplished all that he did! We can only wonder at what he would have done at Gettysburg. Surely he would have insisted that Stuart stay close to the army, that . . . . Continue Reading »
Togetherness Today
by James PoulosHere’s a nice contrast. First, Rod : As Wendell Berry explains, especially in “Sex, the Economy, Freedom & Community,” you cannot have community without order, and you cannot have a workable order as long as both economic and sexual decisions are wholly privatized — that . . . . Continue Reading »
Two Europes
by James PoulosDon Rumsfeld has left us with the momentarily illuminating but ultimately distracting vision of Old Europe and New Europe, a distinction that divides geographically along the aftershadow of the Iron Curtain, with snooty/fuddy Western Europe versus freedom-appreciating/US-embracing Eastern Europe. . . . . Continue Reading »
A Bobo’s Guide to Euro-Socialism
by Samuel GoldmanI’m spending the morning (and now part of the afternoon) on one of those fancy buses that has an internet connection. Since I didn’t have the foresight to download an episode of Battlestar Galactica, I’ve got nothing better to do than read tomorrow’s New York Times, and to . . . . Continue Reading »
Glory vs. the Garden Gnome
by James PoulosRoger Scruton’s written a book on beauty, in case you hadn’t heard. Here’s a nice little review, which frames the beauty question evocatively enough in terms of beauty’s relation, or antagonism, to kitsch. And so I ask: if beauty is the promise of happiness, is the problem . . . . Continue Reading »
Blowing Up the University
by James PoulosMarc C. Taylor, chairman of the religion department at Columbia, wants to “end the university as we know it.” But he wants to do it wrong: “The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex . . . . Continue Reading »
Of Empire
by James PoulosThere is a compelling start of a conversation, I see, between Daniel Larison and Noah Millman . Noah began in reaction to Andrew Bacevich’s latest introduction to a book . Bacevich, of course, takes the anti-imperial position of William Appleman Williams to be a clarion wake-up call for any . . . . Continue Reading »
Solophobia
by James PoulosIn the Emmy-winning 1997 version of Rebecca , there’s a scene in which the new, young Mrs. de Winter is harassed by one of the film’s less savory characters for claiming to enjoy being alone at the vast Manderlay estate while her husband is away on business. From our present-day . . . . Continue Reading »
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