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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In Defence–Really Praise–of Scholasticism
In a recent comment on my page Think Before You Convert "KYCath" (I assume that means Kentucky Catholic) there was the following: In short, Wills exposes how the original infrastructures of the Catholic Church morphed and transformed over the ages, so that original dogmas–and the understanding of their meaning thereof–changed to the point where the …
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Book Review: Richard Hofstader's The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays
Political analysis and punditry can date awfully quickly. Nevertheless--and this is especially true in a place like the United States, whose structural continuity is exceptional--some pieces of political prose, especially when written in a historical context, can have relevance for several generations. One of those analyses--actually a series of essays not originally intended to be …
"Proud Mary" No Longer Proud to be an American
Tina Turner calls its quits on the U.S.: US pop legend Tina Turner, who has been living in Switzerland since 1995, will soon receive Swiss citizenship and will give up her US passport, Swiss media reported Friday. "I'm very happy in Switzerland and I feel at home here. ... I cannot imagine a better place …
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Positive Infinity 