The state of Indiana has passed a law that allows citizens to shoot police officers if they reasonably believe the cops have entered their home illegally. PJ Media » Why the GOP-backed Indiana Gun Law Is a Terrible Idea. Conservatives used to make a point of saying, “I support my local police.” Is anti-government and pro-gun sentiment so strong now that it’s all right to shoot police officers who have made a mistake? Aren’t there legal remedies that will click… Read more
The right for monks to sell caskets
June 13, 2012 By Gene Veith
34 Comments
One of the medieval “works of mercy” is burying the dead. So the Benedicting monks of St. Joseph Abbey in Louisiana, who had been making hand-crafted wooden caskets for members of their order, decided to make them available to the public. But before they sold even one, state officials filed a cease-and-desist order, threatening the monks with fines and criminal prosecution. It seems Louisiana has protectionist laws favoring local funeral directors, who alone are entitled to sell coffins. Now the… Read more
Luther the detective: Getting your hands dirty
June 12, 2012 By Gene Veith
16 Comments
Luther is the acclaimed British crime drama now available to Americans on BBC America. Here is the Wikipedia description of John Luther, played by Golden-Globe winner Idris Elba: He is obsessive, possessed, and sometimes dangerous in the violence of his fixations. But Luther has paid a heavy price for his dedication; he has never been able to prevent himself from being consumed by the darkness of the crimes with which he deals. For Luther, the job always comes first. His… Read more
Danish law mandates church weddings for gays
June 12, 2012 By Gene Veith
80 Comments
Denmark has passed a law requiring the state Lutheran church to hold church weddings for gay couples. It allows pastors who don’t believe in gay marriage–from one-third to one-half of the clergy–to opt out, but bishops must provide a replacement pastor to preside over the wedding. It isn’t clear to me from the news stories how this will affect other church bodies than the state church. Reuters says, “The new law permits homosexual marriages in the Evangelical Lutheran Church as… Read more
Obama’s data mining
June 12, 2012 By Gene Veith
12 Comments
Yesterday we posted about mining “big data,” how corporations, politicians, and researchers are delving into Twitter, Google, Facebook, and other online information to forecast trends, target customers, and gain various competitive advantages. Well, it turns out that the Obama campaign is mining such data on voters on a massive, unprecedented scale. Politico’s Lois Romano reports: On the sixth floor of a sleek office building here, more than 150 techies are quietly peeling back the layers of your life. They know… Read more
Luther the detective: Vocation
June 11, 2012 By Gene Veith
8 Comments
There is a TV show on BBC called Luther about a British police investigator, a black man played by Idris Elba. According to Jordan Ballor, Luther is also Lutheran, a dramatic exploration of vocation and what it means to be a little Christ to your neighbor. I haven’t seen the show, but I’ve got to now. Ballor’s essay is worth two blog posts. First, I appreciate his explanation of vocation, along with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s application. I’ll post that today. Tomorrow… Read more
Obama: “The private sector is doing fine”
June 11, 2012 By Gene Veith
42 Comments
President Obama said something that will be a much-replayed sound-bite in the presidential race: Laying out his economic argument at a morning news conference, Obama said that cutbacks in state and local government spending have slowed the nation’s recovery and that Congress has “no excuse” for not supporting his jobs bill that would provide funding to retain public workers. “The private sector,” the president added as a point of comparison, “is doing fine.” The remark struck a discordant political note… Read more
Mining “big data”
June 11, 2012 By Gene Veith
18 Comments
An interesting article by Ariana Eunjung Cha on how financiers, politicians, and researchers are mining data from Twitter, Google, Facebook, and the like to identify trends and forecast the future: From a trading desk in London, Paul Hawtin monitors the fire hose of more than 340 million Twitter posts flying around the world each day to try to assess the collective mood of the populace. The computer program he uses generates a global sentiment score from 1 to 50 based… Read more
Not knowing if you are a Christian
June 8, 2012 By Gene Veith
238 Comments
Picking up on some earlier discussion, I came across this list of ways that a person can know whether or not they have been truly saved. They are from a book by Jim Wilson entitled (ironically, it seems to me) Assurance of Salvation: 1. The Holy Spirit seals, guarantees, and assures us (1 Jn. 4:13, Rom. 8:16-17, Eph. 1:13-14, 2 Cor. 5:5, 1 Cor. 2:11-16). 2. Change of Character: read the lists of the works of the flesh and the… Read more
Congress letting bureaucrats make the laws
June 8, 2012 By Gene Veith
10 Comments
Another practice in which Congress evades its constitutional responsibilities: Passing laws that consist largely of vague frameworks and enabling bureaucrats from the executive branch to fill in the blanks with the substance of the law. George Will on a bill that would put regulations back under Congressional scrutiny: John Marini of the University of Nevada, Reno, writes in the Claremont Review of Books that the 2,500-page Obamacare legislation exemplifies current lawmaking, which serves principally to expand the administrative state’s unfettered… Read more
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