Our newspaper is trying to expand its health coverage. This might be a Good Thing if it were clearer what is meant by this. At the moment, I'm skeptical. Like most newspapers, we run the wire stories every Thursday on the most noteworthy articles from the medical journals. And we run lots of puffery on the latest diet fads (Atkins is a boon for pork rind producers!). Beyond that, most of what we run has to do with prevention. Nothing... Read more
Gordon Atkinson, aka the Real Live Preacher, has posted the latest of his retellings of stories from the Bible, "Even the Rich Woman." (Part one is here. Part two is here.) I probably lost some of you there with that phrase "stories from the Bible," but please don't let that stop you. This is one of the trickier stories — the one about Jesus, Judas and the woman with the Very Expensive Perfume. It's about wealth, poverty, generosity, justice and,... Read more
Al Mohler's confessed "fascination" with homosexuality (see below) sent me back to a "Shop & Save" column I wrote for PRISM magazine in 1999. In that column I noted — and praised — the relatively recent recognition by conservative evangelicals of the idea that investment and consumer decisions should be in accord with one's professed values. Evidence of this newfound recognition included the Timothy Plan (a socially screened mutual fund) and the Family Research Council's program (now defunct) on "Stewardship... Read more
The Rev. Al Mohler is "fascinated" with homosexuality. "Fascinating" is his word: The spectacular success of the homosexual movement stands as one of the most fascinating phenomena of our time. In less than two decades, homosexuality has moved from "the love that dares not speak its name," to the center of America's public life. The center of America's public life? That seems a bit much — Bravo isn't even the center of basic cable. In the latest of a long,... Read more
Somewhere in Des Moines or Cedar Rapids, a shabbily dressed man is thumbing through a stack of papers, muttering to himself about months of wasted work. He spent much of the last week tracking down some guy Christie Vilsack supposedly dated back in high school. The guy, it turns out, never actually dated her, and none of the nasty things he had to say actually panned out. But still, some of it might have turned out to be useful, maybe.... Read more
Re: Reagan's Bind Stan Taylor e-mails the lyrics of the Austin Lounge Lizards' song "The Ballad of Ronald Reagan," which includes the following verse: He's our gun-running president He's slippery as a squid He's stupid if he didn't know, Dishonest if he did Yep, that's Reagan's Bind. If there was a third option, nobody's figured out yet what it was. * * * Today's pixels. Eric Umansky has a blog. How long has this been going on? * * *... Read more
Atticus Finch, like John Edwards, was a trial lawyer. So was Fiorello LaGuardia. So was Ralph Nader, back when he was widely admired. So was Thurgood Marshall. So was Abraham Lincoln. "Most people can distinguish between a good trial lawyer and a bad trial lawyer," Joshua Green wrote in this prescient 2001 Washington Monthly article. Green traces the miserable failure of former Sen. Lauch Faircloth's attempts to attack John Edwards because of his profession in the 1998 North Carolina Senate... Read more
Working for Change has a disturbing, Wendell Berry-esque article from Dan Nagengast called "Safe, but do we want to eat it?" Nagengast begins with this attention-getting sentence: When I found out that our industrialized food system considers chicken manure an acceptable source of protein in cattle feed, it was clear to me that consumers and corporate agriculture have very different ideas about how we should produce food. There's something deeply wrong with a system that makes the animals that feed... Read more
OK, so, Godspell. Thing is a friend of mine directs summer drama classes at this school in Bryn Mawr, Pa. They have a three-week whirlwind rehearsal period that ends with a full production, and this summer they're doing Godspell. It's an all-girls Catholic school and, for quasi-theological and dramatic reasons with which I strongly disagree, they weren't really comfortable with having a girl play the part of Jesus. And since I'm a male and my work schedule makes me available... Read more
President Bush's predecessor, despite leaving office as the most popular two-term president since Eisenhower, left the country deeply divided. The previous president was a man of enormous charisma who had presided over years of economic expansion and was beloved by a majority of Americans. But he was also deeply distrusted and hated by about a third of the country because of eight long years of demonizing attacks. George Bush was elected, in part, because he campaigned on the promise that... Read more
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