In an op-ed column in today's New York Times, David Brooks offers a preemptive defense of American resolve in the face of atrocities yet to be committed by Americans. Brooks argues that such atrocities will be a necessary and vital component of America winning the war in Iraq, which is also, he says, "the Battle of Midway in our war on terror." The president will have to remind us that we live in a fallen world, that we have to... Read more
1. Dominic Nutt of Christian Aid notes in The Guardian that the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq is in violation of a U.N. resolution over its handling of reconstruction funds from Iraq's oil income: Under UN resolution 1483, the UN also obliged the coalition to set up an independent monitoring board to oversee and to publish these oil accounts. This was meant to happen in May this year and failure is no minor matter. Does this mean the Bush administration... Read more
From Avishai Margalit's essay in The New York Review of Books on Norman Podhoretz's The Prophets: Who They Were, What They Are: There is true greatness, I believe, in the prophets. Their writings should not be treated as relevant "lessons" for our times, whether the lesson is for the left, the right, or the center. (Still, anyone who reads Jeremiah, for me the most powerful of the prophets, will recognize that Norman Podhoretz would be hard put to recruit him... Read more
A hearty "amen" to this post from Amy Sullivan, who writes of her: … continuing frustration with reporters who have very thin Rolodexes when it comes to writing about religion. Barry Lynn can certainly be considered an expert on most religious matters and I'm sure he's a fine person. But when he is the only source ever quoted to represent a very broad array of opinion, public debate suffers. So, once again, religion/politics reporters: Pull out a few extra cards... Read more
I don't remember much of Donald W. Thompson's series of rapture movies from when I saw them back in middle school at Hydewood Park Baptist Church. I do remember that they were pretty scary. Thompson was a low-budget hack, but he had an eye for haunting detail — the drone of an unattended lawn mower in a suburban yard (Thompson raptured people fully clothed) was far creepier and more affecting than anything in Left Behind. Thompson's films — A Thief... Read more
Left Behind, pg. 18 Rayford and Hattie are milling about the plane, full of panic that so many passengers have vanished, yet also strangely serene in their incuriosity about what may be happening. Then Hattie discovers that one of their crew is among the missing: She lifted a blazer, shirt and tie still intact. Trousers lay are her feet. Hattie frantically turned the blazer to the low light and read the name tag. “Tony!” she wailed. “Tony’s gone!” Over the... Read more
Left Behind, pp. 15-19 So, anyway, back to Rayford Steele. You remember Rayford. He’s the kinky, control-freak, middle-aged pilot so obsessed with his lust for a young, subservient flight attendant that he seems not to have noticed a nuclear war. LaHaye and Jenkins strayed from Rayford for a few pages there in order to introduce us to Buck Williams, and to provide a little more background. Through Buck’s eyes, we learn that this story takes place in the proverbial “not-so-distant... Read more
The first of the month brings bad news (rent is due), and good — Charles Peters' new "Tilting at Windmills" column is online at The Washington Monthly. Last week, Salon thawed out Camille Paglia — the worst thing to come out of Philadelphia since Mannequin II — for an interview. Paglia made the bizarre claim that her gratefully defunct occasional column for Salon was "the first true blog." Now and then one sees the claim that Kausfiles was the first... Read more
Stephen Crane was born on this day in 1871 in Newark, N.J. You probably had to read The Red Badge of Courage in high school. It's one of those great books, like Of Mice and Men, that schools tend to make you read just a little too soon, before you're ready to really enjoy them. For me, it's probably still a little too soon for Crane's poems — he called them simply "lines." There's a good collection of them at... Read more
A few weeks back, as the famous Iraqi schools were reopening, NPR ran a story in which U.S. soldiers spoke with pride of the extra efforts they had put into repairing and painting the classrooms of one school. This was a "good news" story, although I paid it no special note then, since it came before the Bush administration began its whiny campaign bemoaning the supposed absence of such reporting. The soldiers' actions were commendable, but what struck me was... Read more
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