Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Janet Daley in the Telegraph lays out the stark choices we face: What is being challenged is nothing less than the most basic premise of the politics of the centre ground: that you can have free market economics and a democratic socialist welfare system at the same time. The magic formula in which the wealth …
Continue reading "Affordability and Morality in our Social Welfare System"
(Dovetail DOVE 35) 1975 One of the most difficult genres of albums to sell is the spoken word. That's because it's not easy to sustain the listener's interest over a sustained period. Long talking head videos have the same problem. This album is a glorious exception to that. Henderson, originally from Liverpool, regales us with …
Continue reading "Stewart Henderson: Whose Idea of Fun is a Nightmare"
Albert Mohler documents the rise of the "Clergy Project": The Clergy Project’s own statement is even more blunt, describing itself as “a confidential online community for active and former clergy who do not hold supernatural beliefs.” Most people, believers and unbelievers alike, are no doubt in the habit of thinking that the Christian ministry requires …
Continue reading "Atheists in the Pulpit? The Last Step, but Not the First"
So we now have Mitt Romney as the Republican nominee for President. It's an odd thing in many ways, not because the party grandees threw their lot in with him--that's par for the course. It's odd because they were able to get it past the people who supposedly dominate the party--the "Religious Right", those dreadful …
Continue reading "Mitt Romney and the Religion of the Middle Class"
(Myrrh MST 6506) 1972 UK One curiosity of Christian records in the "Jesus Music" era are albums where one side is recorded by a different group than the other. A helpful way for two groups to share the cost, it had the added bonus of not requiring one group to come up with more that …
Continue reading "The Alethians and the Right Angle with David Pope: One Way"
Last week I took a page from "cassock and surplice" Anglicanism--the funeral of World War I flying ace Manfred "Red Baron" von Richtofen--to show what "1662 BCP" Anglicanism looked like in a celebrated event. The significance of my slighting the alb was well understood. So I guess a little "equal time" might be in order. …
The famous (if unlikely) team of Boies and Olsen are backpedaling on their case to overturn Proposition 8--and establish same-sex civil marriage by national default: The two high-profile lawyers who started the nation’s most significant lawsuit attempting to gain marriage rights for same-sex couples told the Supreme Court on Friday that it might find it very interesting …
Continue reading "Same-Sex Civil Marriage: Not Quite Ready to Go for Broke"
On a recent edition of Stakelbeck on Terror, he discusses with Tawfik Hamid the difference between the Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. (That discussion starts at about 13:30 into the video below). http://dl2.cbn.com/cbnplayer/cbnPlayer.swf?s=/Archive/News/Stakelbeck_Terror_082112_WS Five years ago, I got into an extended email debate with an Indonesian Salafi. One of the points he tried …
Continue reading "The Difference Between Salafis and the Muslim Brotherhood"
Students in China are caught between two systems, one Marxist-Leninist and one capitalist. The result is this: The curious collision of ideological coercion and material opportunity births a conformity-breeding exhaustion. To resist the constant current of ideological homogeneity requires relentless energy and vigilance: to remember that no matter how compelling the words of the anchor …
Continue reading "The U.S. and China: Passing Each Other in the Night on Academic Freedom?"
I've put off writing this piece for a long time. The subject is sensitive for a number of reasons. But given the things going on both here, in Europe and the Middle East these days, perhaps it's time to visit this subject, although I'd be the first to admit the example I'm presenting isn't the …
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