Life would be better if Esquire made its blogs mobile friendly

Charlie Pierce is one of my favorite bloggers.

Unfortunately, I do most of my blog-reading these days through the Google Reader app on Kindle. Trying to read Charlie’s blog this way is occasionally difficult, occasionally merely slow and unpleasant, and quite often impossible.

So it would be really cool if Esquire would fix that. Just sayin’.

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I like what Tony Jones argues in his post “There Are No Thin Places.”

But I suspect that what he really means is there are only thin places.

“God isn’t more some places and less in other places,” Tony writes. So maybe a better title for that post would have been “There Are No Thick Places.”

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I’m sympathetic to much of what William H. Frey says in his op-ed, “Baby boomers had better embrace change.”

It’s largely a critique of the way graying white baby boomers are trying to stand athwart history yelling “Stop!” and how they’re making a zero-sum game of old vs. young the death rattle of their generation’s politics.

True enough, that. But this, from Frey, is inaccurate:

What’s emerging is a cultural gap between the largest generation and the youngest.

The largest generation — by quite a bit — is the Millennials. There were some 77 million or so baby boomers, which was a lot. But there are fewer of them every year because, well, that’s how it works. The size of the Millennial cohort varies depending on the various dates given for this “generation,” but there are at least 80 million of them.

The Millennial generation is bigger than the baby boom. And the difference in their size, and in their relative influence, will grow every year.

“Baby boomers had better embrace change,” indeed.

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Speaking of generational observations, several smart writers commented on a recent study of my generation and X-ers’ declining commitment to institutional religion.

Mark Silk titled his post “Gen-X Catholic Debacle.” Hemant Mehta went with “New Study Shows Generation X Has Grown Less Religious Over Time.” And Michelle Boorstein’s post is titled, “Huge religion survey: Gen X-ers less Christian, less Republican.”

All those are fine, but in keeping with the retro feel of this study and all of those early 1990s echoes, shouldn’t somebody have used “Life After God“?

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John Holbo is not impressed with Ross Douthat’s criticism of secular liberalism.

He goes to great length to explain why, but the core of it is right here:

It doesn’t prove anything to dunk secular ethics, but not theological ethics, in this skeptical acid. Either God’s commandments are arbitrary or they make sense. If they are arbitrary — well, that’s hardly an improvement over secular humanism, in the worst case scenario. If they make sense, they make sense. Secular humanists can help themselves to anything that makes sense. They can hold onto the commands but lose the Commander. So, whether the ethical news is good or bad, the news is the same for the secularist and the religious believer.