Whigs!
I just finished reading Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848. As best I can judge, it’s a fine book. I’m especially pleased with its treatment of religion in...
Author: William Brafford
Spinning my wheels.
Does anybody else ever have weeks or months where the world seems to push back really hard against your conception of it? Where it seems to shake off all your attempts to impose order...
Loving and hating libertarians.
Wirkman Netizan, a libertarian blog, has posted two lists: reasons to love libertarians and reasons to hate them. Here’s one (two?) from the “hate” list: “The prevalence of natural law and natural rights theory...
The America of Nora Roberts.
Lauren Collins’ New Yorker article on Nora Roberts (June 22nd issue, not online yet) was, at first, the most culturally alienating thing I’ve read in a while. But maybe it’s not so bad. Key...
Post offices used to be awesome.
Maybe the modern postal service could look to the past to help make the lines more bearable?
What consolation of philosphy?
“Critchley leafs through the pages of his register and concludes, as did Montaigne, that the consolation of philosophy is ‘the stillness of the soul’s dialogue with itself. … It is the achievment of a...
You lost me there.
So I’m pretty excited about tonight’s season finale of Lost. I’ve been watching steadily since the last part of the third season, and now we’re at the end of the fifth season, with one...
Let’s not call it exceptionalism.
I do appreciate what Mark is trying to do. The stereotypical American exceptionalist wants to argue that the transcendently unique ideals of the U.S.A.’s founding justify a broader range of actions in dealing with...
Dirty, dirty hands.
“He orders the man tortured, convinced that he must do so for the sake of the people who might otherwise die in the explosions—even though he believes that torture is wrong, indeed abominable, not...
A great headline…
A.O. Scott’s review of X-Men Origins: Wolverine is headlined, “I, Mutant, Red in Face and Claw,” which I think is wonderful. It gets me wondering, though: do movie review headline writers have some kind...
Tradition in the modern United States.
The briefest description I can give of the point of view for my work as a blogger is this: I’m a Presbyterian wandering around in the gap between Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue and Jeffrey...
On drawing attention to that which you despise.
To judge by the big bold text on the posters that have been appearing all over campus, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been invaded by white supremacists. If you read...
Who was Spengler?
I can’t remember how I first found Spengler, but it was sometime in the fall of 2007 when I was tentatively trying to figure out how to run my first blog. Then as now,...
Justice claims are moral claims.
Scott makes the argument, bizarre to my ears, that the language of morality has somehow become the special property of the religious Right, and implies that the movement liberalism has neglected its inheritance of...
Observe and report.
Observe and Report is going to surprise many people who go see it this weekend. And perhaps not in a good way. From the TV spots for Seth Rogen’s new movie, you might think...
The notion of judicial activism.
My name’s on the sidebar now, so I feel obligated to offer a brief response to E.D.’s post on judicial activism. E.D. writes: “The whole notion of ‘activist judges’ is essentially a ruse.” Perhaps...
Indie rock, DIY, localism.
E.D. wrote, “The idealism of the paleoconservative cause is simply too burdened by the idealism of its vision.” To which I offer—not necessarily as a rebuttal—three letters: DIY. As punks and hardcore kids in...
The early church and its franchises.
I had to cough-barf my way through Robert Wright’s article on religion and globalization in the April 2009 Atlantic. It’s called “One World, Under God,” and it tries to explain the spread of early...
Taibbi could be way off base…
…or he could be absolutely correct; either way, to read him going off on the NYT’s AIG quitter is about as much fun as you can have on the clean parts of the Internet.
“But who versus? Who are we doing it versus?”
The finale of the fourth season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia opened with Charlie bursting into the bar, carrying a messy stack of paper, and telling his friends that he wrote a musical—just...
