It wasn't always so, at least not as we understand it. In discussing Leo the Great, Hughes Oliphant Old's The Reading and Preaching of the Scriptures in the Worship of the Christian Church, Vol. 2: The Patristic Age has this to say: Lent has usually been explained as a period of forty days during which …
Homeschoolers Should Play Golf
The Virgina House of Delegates means well... A BILL THAT would allow Virginia students who are home-schooled to play on public-school sports teams has cleared the state House and is now headed to a Senate committee, where a similar measure died last year. ...but personally I think they should skip the risks to life and …
Pope Benedict XVI: Another Great Refusal Leads to Another Great Nailbiter
This came as something of a shock: Pope Benedict XVI announced Monday that he would resign on February 28 -- the first pontiff to do so in nearly 600 years -- setting the stage for a conclave to elect a new pope before the end of March. A Vatican official said the Holy See hopes …
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Albert Mohler Faces Reality
And not a moment too soon either: Evangelicals appear to be headed for some kind of marginalization, and this will hurt. Nevertheless, evangelical Christianity began on the margins of society and only in fairly recent decades moved into the mainstream. As it turns out, our cultural influence may wane and our options for recovering that …
Millions of Dead Fish, Part II
Well, we may not be quite up to 106, but... A federal mandate to remove old, abandoned oil and gas rigs in the Gulf of Mexico is blowing up a lot more than just the rigs. Undercover video obtained by Local 15 shows thousands of pounds of dead fish, mostly red snapper, floating to the …
Paul Krugman's Moment of Truth About Death Panels
Every now and then the smallest man in Princeton blurts it out: And in a rare glimpse of candor, Krugman appealed to a more “progressive” way of keeping health care costs down: “We won’t be able to pay for the kind of government the society will want without some increase in taxes on the middle …
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The Class Struggle Finally Comes to America
With a vengeance: The striking similarities between what happened to black Americans at an earlier stage in our history and what is happening now to white working-class Americans may shed new light on old debates about cultural versus structural explanations of poverty. What’s clear is that economic opportunity, while not the only factor affecting marriage, …
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Jesus' Triumphal Entry: Not in Palm Beach
Our Lord wept over Jerusalem, but what about this: My last Palm Sunday piece concerned the custom of the palm crosses at Bethesda-by-the-Sea. Evidently it's just as well Bethesda stuck with palm crosses; a real triumphal entry into Palm Beach would have been met, not by the Pharisees, but the Palm Beach police. And it …
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The Republicans Finally Figure it Out on the Sequester
It took long enough: In November 2011, President Obama lamented that “some in Congress are trying to undo these automatic spending cuts” that were part of that August’s deal to raise the debt limit. “My message to them is simple: No. I will veto any effort to get rid of those automatic spending cuts to …
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Old Hickory Falls Out of Favour in his own Party
All glory is fleeting, I suppose: Andrew Jackson, the president whose divisive political instincts would shape the Democratic Party for generations, was born less than 20 miles from here, in the Waxhaw region between the Carolinas. Until the 1980s, “Old Hickory” was considered a near-great president, just a few notches below Washington, Lincoln and Franklin …
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Positive Infinity 