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Religion and Public Life With Mark Silk

Today is a tragic day for our armed forces. The American military exists for only one purpose – to fight and win wars. Yet it has now been hijacked and turned into a tool for imposing on the country a radical social agenda. This may advance the cause of reshaping social attitudes regarding human sexuality,…

Fifteen billion printed words from 5.2 million books, or 4 percent of all books published! Graphed and searchable! Thank you, Google! Thank you, Harvard! Why am I ecstatic? The project, reported in the journal Science yesterday and available for the use of all, at once creates a new tool for cultural history (dubbed “Culturomics”) and…

Henry Kissinger’s attempt to weasel out of the appalling comments he is now revealed to have made regarding U.S. policy on Soviet Jewry is not, shall we say, convincing. Here, courtesy of Jim Besser’s good post on the subject, is what Kissinger said to Richard Nixon in the White House in 1973: The emigration of…

Over at WaPo’s On Faith, Melissa Rogers, the key player on the first Advisory Council of the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, offers an appreciative but not uncritical assessment of the Obama continuation of the Bush faith-based initiative–essential reading for anyone interested in the thing. Rogers bears witness to the ongoing ideological…

The AP report on Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi’s clarification of Pope Benedict’s notorious condom-and-AIDS remark concluded with the following portentous penultimate graph: Lombardi said the pope didn’t use the technical terminology “lesser evil” in his comments because he wanted his words to be understood by the general public. Vatican officials, however, said that was what…

The ethnic cleansing of Christians from Iraq. Great job, Georgie!

Hardly anyone, including me, is likely to lose any sleep over yesterday’s verdict in federal court in Salt Lake City that found David Brian Mitchell guilty of kidnapping Elizabeth Smart and transporting her across state lines for purposes of sexual activity. And yet, it’s hard not to believe that Mitchell is crazy as a bedbug–as…

When the Catholic lumpen-laity needs to be told what the Church teaches, Our Sunday Visitor is there to teach it. So it should not be surprising that, in the wake of the brouhaha over Pope Benedict’s statement on condoms, OSV should get on the horn to Father Martin Rhonheimer, the Opus Dei professor who has…

I’m basically down with Dan Schultz’s suggestion that God takes sides, and that the side God takes is the side of the poor. Of course, being me, I’d probably get all professorial and say that the Judeo-Christian tradition, or maybe the Abrahamic one, suggests a preferential option for the poor (as the Catholics say) on…

At the USCCB meeting in Baltimore a month ago, Bishop Ron Herzog of Alexandria, LA, summoned his fellow hierarchs to join the Social Media World. (I’ve posted his talk after the jump, courtesy of Rocco.) There’s plenty of tasty food for thought, though I have to say I’m a little puzzled by the implication that…
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