Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
It's supposed to be the time of year for joy and merriment, but I've seen a few things lately that bother me about the immediate course of the country. Most of those concern foreign policy, that necessary evil Americans aren't very good at, even with all the years of travel and media coverage. (I think …
Continue reading "Let's Not Do Something Stupid About the Russians"
It's been a bit since Ephraim Radner and Christopher Seitz "crossed the Rubicon" and set forth The Marriage Pledge, which calls ministers to stop officiating civil marriages. Reactions have been mixed. The fact that I can say that shows that the steady legalisation of same-sex civil marriage has forced Christians--who have been working to "preserve marriage", …
Continue reading "The Marriage Pledge: A Gratifying Step on Civil vs. Ecclesiastical Marriage"
Today is the Feast of Christ the King. The script that calls out the liturgical year on this site simply refers to this as the Sunday before Advent, and that's what it was for centuries. The idea of this feast--at the end of the liturgical year--comes from the "new theology", one that generally gets a …
Many of you know that, in spite of a lot of what turns up on this blog, I am a member of the North Cleveland Church of God and worked for the church's International Offices in the Lay Ministries Department for 13 1/2 years. So I'm not a stranger to at least some of our …
Continue reading "My Challenge to Church of God Ministers: Take the Marriage Pledge"
The Republican "wave" (what that means electorally depends upon whom you talk to) in the recent Congressional elections has highlighted their opponents' weaknesses at the state level. To a large extent there are two electorates: one at the mid-term and one at the Presidential year. The one thing these two have in common, according to …
Continue reading "Maybe the Democrats Don't Need a Deep Electoral Bench"
I've not had the time lately to post in as timely fashion as I would like, mostly because of the semester-by-semester crapshoot which is my PhD pursuit. But there's a long-term issue that deserves some comment, and that concerns a long-overdue attitude adjustment that Evangelicals need to make because of events in the Middle East. …
Continue reading "The Evangelical Comeuppance in the Middle East"
In this wild election cycle, a Republican is about to break a record she wasn't "supposed to": An upstate New York Republican is slated Tuesday to shatter the congressional record of former Brooklyn Democratic Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman as the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. Elise Stefanik, 30, is favored to win in New York’s …
In the middle of Julian Assange's long diatribe on Google, we have this: The received wisdom in advanced capitalist societies is that there still exists an organic “civil society sector” in which institutions form autonomously and come together to manifest the interests and will of citizens. The fable has it that the boundaries of this …
Thorston Pattberg at Asia Times Online thinks he's found something novel: There is a cult of Western evangelists and self-righteous crusaders who are determined to dislodge non-Western nations and usurp their governments. Unfortunately, Western "experts" have hung around China for a long time. In the years immediately after the start of the People's Republic, same …
Continue reading "The "Cult" of China Experts is Hardly New"
Last Friday evening my wife and I got to do something that doesn't happen very often around here: go to a movie première, in this case that of the documentary Harriet's Secret. The film is produced and narrated by Dean Arnold, who is a well-known figure in this community. As the trailer conveys, it's an …
Positive Infinity 