Our college librarian had a blog, sort of. This was the late 1980s, so it was strictly analog. He called it the Comment Book. It was just about my favorite thing on campus. The Comment Book was a large loose-leaf binder that sat on top of the card index. Inside, each page was divided by a crisp vertical line down the center. Each half of the page was labeled with some variation of “Your Comments” and “Jim’s Comments.” Jim’s side... Read more
From Military.com, “Navy JAG Resigns Over Torture Issue“: “It was with sadness that I signed my name this grey morning to a letter resigning my commission in the U.S. Navy,” wrote Gig Harbor, Wash., resident and attorney-at-law Andrew Williams in a letter to The Peninsula Gateway last week. “There was a time when I served with pride … Sadly, no more.” Williams’ sadness stems from the recent CIA videotape scandal in which tapes showing secret interrogations of two [suspected] al-Qaida... Read more
Our text for this Thursday’s flame-war open thread comes from David P. Gushee’s fascinating study, The Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust: The Righteous Gentiles were those Europeans who counted Jews within the boundaries of moral obligation while the most powerful nation in Europe was putting to death every Jew it could find. In welcoming hunted and hated strangers they risked the destruction of themselves and their loved ones. Such actions marked a reversal of all-too-customary human moral practice. Most often,... Read more
Something is very wrong with Mona Charen. That’s obvious to anyone who reads her repugnant recent column and it’s apparently obvious to Charen as well. She’s even managed to creep herself out with her eager defense of torture and thus her self-esteem is at an all-time low. So Charen does what many of us do when we’re feeling deservedly ashamed and repulsed by our own failures: She looks for someone worse with whom she can compare herself favorably. As the... Read more
Left Behind, pp. 379-381 When Buck and Chloe reconnected with Hattie and Chloe’s father, it was clear Hattie had been crying. The Event occurred just over a week ago, so it shouldn’t be out of the ordinary to see people red-faced and puffy-eyed from frequent crying jags. So soon after such an earth-shaking trauma, nobody would need a particular reason to break down crying. The two-thirds of the earth’s people remaining would all be prone to sudden, irresistible waves of... Read more
I’ve long admired (abstractly, from afar) the kind of piety and devotion described in Brother Lawrence’s The Practice of the Presence of God (the full text is online here) or the idea of Frank Laubach’s “game with minutes” as described in his Letters by a Modern Mystic. Such efforts to find the holy in the mundane and to seek an attitude of love and prayer for everyone we encounter seem saintly in the best sense.* God knows as well that... Read more
The word from Typepad is that I need to help “train” their new spam filter, by which they mean using their new tool that allows me to surf through everything the filter flags as spam, selecting all of the legitimate comments and republishing them while confirming the spamminess of all the actual spam and deleting those comments, screen by screen. TypePad also reminded me that TPS reports now need to use the standard cover sheet. Apparently there was a memo.... Read more
The Good News: Typepad has revamped it’s spam filters for comments. The Bad News: It’s now classifying lots of legitimate comments as spam — sort of the spam-filter equivalent of lupus. I’m trying to figure out what I can do to tweak this. They’ve changed the comment-editing interface (unannounced and without instructions), so I’ll see if I can navigate that to make this work better. My apologies for the infuriating inconvenience (particularly to those of you whom Typepad seems especially... Read more
To fully appreciate the perspective, values and standards of “Movieguide,” consider this: They present an annual award called the Faith & Values Crystal Teddy Bear Award for Dedication to Redeeming the Values of the Mass Media of Entertainment. Last year, a Special Lifetime Faith & Values Crystal Teddy Bear Award for Dedication to Redeeming the Values of the Mass Media of Entertainment was given to Pat Boone. I don’t know if they refer to this as the F&VCTBADRVMME for short,... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In