DISPELLING ELVISH PROPAGANDA. Lots of fun. Link via Los Volokh. Read more

A CRUEL PRO-LIFE STANCE: So coming home from the pregnancy center last night I was thinking about something you’ll hear at times from the mouths of people who oppose abortion. (Almost always, but not quite always, these people are men.) “If you aren’t prepared to do the time, don’t do the crime”–in other words, you chose to have sex, so now you have to live with the consequences, i.e. pregnancy, giving birth, and either raising the child or seeing her... Read more

VOCATION AND THE “ONE BEST WAY”: The Christian notion of vocation means that there is no “one best way” to reach God. This is played out really clearly at the end of Book One of The Faerie Queene, when Arthur and the Redcrosse Knight go their separate ways. Throughout Book One “duality,” doubleness, was associated with duplicity and speaking with forked tongue–check out the names of the villainess Duessa and the heroine Una. Yet at the end of the book,... Read more

THE POLITICS OF DANCING II: So the Willis book also spurred me to think about the postmodern love of contradiction–holding contradictory beliefs or impulses, and not attempting to reconcile them. And this naturally led me to the Cat Power song “Say.” And thus I bring you the second installment of The Politics of Dancing, an occasional feature on this blog in which I relate pop lyrics to the workings of my own tangled cerebellum. (Click here for my exegesis of... Read more

HOW ONE BECOMES WHAT ONE IS: I recently read Ellen Willis’s Beginning to See the Light: Sex, Hope, and Rock-and-Roll. It’s an essay collection showing Willis’s various journeys through rock journalism, psychoanalytic theory, individualist feminism, and what can perhaps best be called post-Judaism. (The final essay describes her stay in Israel, her brush with Orthodox Judaism, and her ultimate rejection of that faith.) There’s a lot to talk about there, but I’ll just blog about one recurring theme in the... Read more

IRANIAN WOMEN BLOGGING. This seriously rocks. Via Blogger, appropriately enough. Read more

“Stop calling me Chiquita. You don’t say that to girls you don’t even know.” “Where I learned Spanish, you do.” –Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum, “The Big Steal” Read more

HERE’S ANOTHER “anti-death penalty, pro-Scalia’s recent dissent” article. You’ve probably seen it, but if not, it’s well worth your time. And I’m outta here. Back Saturday. Read more

“A KHRUSHCHEVITE SMELL”: From the Keston Institute, which you should definitely check out: MOLDOVA: “KHRUSHCHEVITE SMELL” FROM NEW CRIMINAL CODE ARTICLE (20 June). Religious leaders and human rights activists have criticised an article in the new Moldovan criminal code lifted almost word for word from an article introduced into the Soviet criminal codes at the beginning of the 1960s during the anti-religious persecution unleashed by Nikita Khrushchev. The Pentecostals and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who learned of the new article from... Read more

RANDOM MAILBAG: Exhibitionism, funeral rites, Israel, London: In response to my comments on blog exhibitionism, a reader sent this quote: “One of America’s specific problems is fame and glory… partly on account of its extreme vulgarization. In this country, it is not the highest virtue, nor the heroic act, that achieves fame, but the uncommon nature of the least significant destiny. There is plenty [of fame] for everyone, then, since the more conformist the system as a whole becomes, the... Read more