More on Proclaiming

we “evangelicals” (or more traditionally, just “???????????”, as they were first called in Antioch — just “Christians”) tend to make it a lot more complicated than it has to be. Continue Reading »

Demystification and Legend

Bryan Wandel has a good blog post here . Short, insightful, and well worth the read. One quibble however: Without accounting for the relationship between these two, Weber’s demystification (and ours) only regards the logical explanation of things, and not the participation and commitment that . . . . Continue Reading »

Letterman and the Abolition of Cruelty

Cruelty, the famous theorist Judith Shklar tells us, is the worst thing we do. For small-l and big-L liberals as different as Richard Rorty and George Kateb, cruelty is borne of moral solipsism, an overly me-centric attitude toward experience that blinds us to the truth about the reality of other . . . . Continue Reading »

Scattered Preliminary Thoughts on Ephemerisle

Those looking for the full-Gonzo narrative account of some of the more interesting 48 hours of my life will have to look elsewhere, if I ever get around to writing it. Short version: It was fun, nobody died. What follows is more like a post-mortem that includes things that surprised me, things that . . . . Continue Reading »

Glenn Beck Is Not a Pomocon

Rod tells me that Nate Silver, who gained fame as the best, most readable electoral statistician around, has made a mistake . And so he has: Beck is a PoMoCon — a post-modern conservative. And his philosophy is not all that difficult to articulate. It borrows a couple of things from . . . . Continue Reading »

Incoherence and Independence

A semi-tangent apropos of the thread developing below on Reagan’s is-it-or-isn’t-it conservatism: it’s true that Reagan’s public brew of conservative moralism and vigilence combined with western-libertarian free-range thought, inclusive of religion, reflects in telling or . . . . Continue Reading »

Sex and Control

Matt Zeitlin should be less surprised by the final sentence of his post (link not suitable for children): I’m not familiar enough with the safe-sex corpus to really comment on it authoritatively, but in my own experience (health classes and so forth), the near-obsessive focus on the . . . . Continue Reading »

Book Recommendations for Obama

Over at the main blog, Joe Carter asks : In all seriousness, though, what books would you recommend the President read during his vacation? Assuming you had to stick to the same  3:1:1 ratio (3 novels, 1 biography, 1 policy-oriented nonfiction) what books would you slip into his travel bag? . . . . Continue Reading »