2008-01-06T17:56:21-05:00

The invaders are everywhere, spanning the globe from the Far East to even here, in the United States. More than a billion of them. They are unruly, uncivilized, irrational. It’s not considered “PC” to say so, but millions of them are simply incapable of reason. And history has taught us, again and again, that they cannot be controlled; they cannot be ignored; they cannot be denied. They cannot be stopped. Forgive me again for being politically incorrect, but most of... Read more

2008-01-05T16:38:11-05:00

Got me one of them spiffy USB turntables for Christmas and suddenly my shelf of useless vinyl isn’t so useless anymore. This thing is ridiculously cool. Right now I’m listening to the 12″ remix of The Mighty Lemon Drops’ “Inside Out” on my computer. (Last time I heard that was, unexpectedly, the Gilmore Girls finale.) Vinyl to iTunes. Life is good. So I’ve been sitting here with the stack o’ records — all the stuff that, for one reason or... Read more

2008-01-04T11:23:33-05:00

Left Behind, pp. 384-387 Buck sat without interrupting as this most lucid and earnest professional calmly propounded a theory that only three weeks before Buck would have found absurd. We’re being given Buck’s point of view here, a window into his thoughts, so this choice of words is apparently his: a "most lucid and earnest professional calmly propounding a theory." Indubitably, my good man. Suddenly Buck Williams has turned into Bertie Wooster. Buck seems unduly impressed with Rayford’s after-the-fact prediction... Read more

2008-01-02T18:28:42-05:00

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

2007-12-27T14:51:51-05:00

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

2007-12-27T07:53:34-05:00

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

2007-12-24T16:04:20-05:00

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2007-12-23T17:35:52-05:00

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

2007-12-21T11:35:45-05:00

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

2007-12-20T20:41:56-05:00

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

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