Gerald McDermott Just after my wife and I watched “The King’s Speech” at the Grandin Theatre in Roanoke, a friend asked me if I enjoyed it. “No, I suffered through it. But it was a great movie.” I have been a stutterer since the age of 6. Every time King George VI puffed his cheeks helplessly as he tried to get out a word, I felt the frustration and pain. http://www.roanoke.com/editorials/commentary/wb/274769 Read more

RR Reno The debate about same-sex marriage brings the modern liberal project to a point of clarity. If marriage can be reshaped to accommodate same-sex couples, then there is nothing that the modern liberal state cannot redefine to serve its own purposes. http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2011/01/marriage-and-the-liberal-empire Read more

Byron Johnson Looking at the supposed repudiation of “the religious right” in the 2008 election, many pundits chortled gleefully that evangelicalism—the conservative brand of Protestantism reflected by Southern Baptists, the Assemblies of God, the Church of the Nazarene, and others who believe in the final authority of the Bible and the need for conversion—is smaller than most have thought, and that the evangelical young have morphed into social liberals. In other words, evangelicals are not as powerful a cultural force... Read more

George Weigel Catholics once had an intuitive understanding of sacred space: To enter a church, especially in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, was to enter a different kind of environment, one of the hallmarks of which was a reverent silence. Some of that intuition remains. But much of it has been lost. http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2011/01/the-chattering-classes-are-us Read more

Throughout his book, but especially toward the end, Metaxas [author of the new biography, Bonhoeffer] turns this erudite and at times abstruse theologian into a living and tragic human being. I would be less than honest if I did not admit that bringing this man—and his intransigence on all the important questions of our time—so vividly to life raises awkward questions for the liberalism in which I put my own faith. How, precisely, would a Rawlsian have acted in those... Read more

Gerald McDermott The documentary With God on Our Side is anything but balanced. It does not give “both sides their due” but instead interviews only Israelis on the far left and ignores Christian Zionists who defend the rights of Palestinians. The result is a one-sided attack on Israel that treats social and political realities with the same ideological insouciance which the documentary assigns to John Hagee and his band. http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctentertainment/2011/01/a-onesided-attack-on-zionism-1.html Read more

Matthew Franck The story of David Epstein, the Columbia University political scientist and Huffington Post blogger now facing criminal charges of incest, has launched a very interesting discussion. What is fascinating about it, and deeply disturbing, is the inability of some commentators to articulate what is morally wrong about the act of incest. http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2011/01/2316 Read more

Wistful desire to evade responsibility exposes the childishness of the adults now preaching the good news of emerging adulthood. They have decided that taking responsibility for other people — spouses, children, employees and subordinates, neighbors, friends, eventually even parents — and relying on them in turn is the heaviest burden that can befall a person. But what if this is instead the means to happiness? http://thenewatlantis.com/publications/slacking-as-self-discovery Read more

RR Reno “We need authority to be ourselves.” So writes Victor Lee Austin in Up With Authority: Why We Need Authority to Flourish as Human Beings. Yes, that’s quite right, but there’s a further truth as well. We need authority so that we can become more than ourselves. http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2011/01/affirming-authority Read more

Sorry, friends: the earlier post was incomplete.  here’s the whole piece: Why is it that the young folk revolted by contemporary excess don’t simply make for the local CofE, or Catholic church, and rediscover the religion of their grandmothers, rather than getting their spirituality via Islam? http://www.spectator.co.uk/faithbased/6603308/why-dont-all-these-disaffected-brits-convert-to-christianity-instead.thtml Read more