OK, JUST ONE MORE: Mark Shea pointed me to this very interesting site–a dude is in RCIA, preparing for Confirmation, and blogging all the way to the altar, as it were. Check it out. Read more

I AM GOING TO NEW YORK tomorrow, back either Thurs. or Fri. Posting will resume then, but I will be super-busy since today is the last non-crazed day I will have for quite some time. When I can, I’ll post about: The Imperial War Museum, with scattered thoughts on our current war; more vouchers!; contest results; and more shark-jumping. And other stuff, presumably. Read more

BAD THEOLOGY WATCH. Grunt. Read more

ABORTION. Julian Sanchez replies to me and Sara Russo. It’s a sophisticated presentation of a position with which I radically disagree. But here’re my thoughts. Sorry for the length. Julian writes, “Despite the public rhetoric associated with the debate, I think that most responsible pro-choice thinkers will grant that a fetus is biologically alive. If this were not clear, then certainly much more of the debate would be on the scientific than philosophical terrain, since most plausible ethical theories would... Read more

THE COUNTERLIFE. I also read The Counterlife on my vacation–finished it on the plane from Heathrow to the airport that should still be named Idlewild. Philip Roth is a great novelist, and I strongly recommend this book. Especially to bloggers who are interested in Israel, and that seems to cover a lot of us, from Unqualified Offerings to the YalePundits. The Counterlife suffers from a degree of fatalism. That may sound odd if you know the strange, overlapping nature of... Read more

BECAUSE THERE ISN’T REALLY A REASON FOR IT TO EXIST, I’m not updating the Booklog (“stuff I’ve said about stuff I’ve read”) site anymore–I’ll just give you book reviews over on the main blog here. Old reviews are still there. Here’s the first of two reviews of books I read while in England. I read David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself because it was described (by National Review’s John Derbyshire, I think) as “getting time travel right.” I didn’t... Read more

some boys take a beautiful girl and hide her away from the rest of the world I want to be the one to walk in the sun oh girls they want to watch blogs oh girls just want to watch blogs… New blog monitors the BBC for bias and various forms of journalistic turpitude. Link via The Edge of England’s Sword. Good posts on invading Iraq from Istanblog (an American in Turkey) and Unqualified Offerings. Scroll down on the latter... Read more

I’D RATHER HAVE A POPE WHO’S A HARLEM GLOBETROTTER than an archbishop who’s a druid. Read more

DIALECTIC: Hitchens’s essay (see below) has some great descriptions and defenses of dialectic as a way of approaching the study of history. He doesn’t talk about the conditions that make dialectic easier or harder; so I guess I’ll have to. Here’s my incomplete list of stuff a class should have if it wants the most robust, personal, rigorous dialectical approach to history: 1) Core knowledge. Students who don’t know what they’re talking about can’t challenge their own beliefs, since they... Read more

ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE. Here’s some stuff I wrote a while ago about dissent and the study of history: “Today there are all kinds of creeds that teach us that …[s]tudents do not need “fifth-century eyes,” because the Western past is irrelevant to them. Although they attend a Western university, and therefore in some sense must be within the Western tradition, they deride theories of education which emphasize that tradition as outdated at best and racist at worst. Dido of... Read more