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Rod Dreher

A mom is fed up with how communications technology affects her teens and their friends. Excerpt: All this communication gadgetry is causing obsessive-compulsive behaviors, giving people control over another’s whereabouts that astonishes me. More frightening is puberty–especially for girls. One of Robert’s friends asked 20 different girls “out” just to have their phone number so…

Philip Jenkins forecasts that the abuse scandal is going to change the Catholic Church — by turning it upside down, demographically. Excerpt: Some media commentators are even asking if the Church can survive the crisis. But most evidence suggests that the Church will endure and even enjoy a historic boom–just not in places it has…

Last night I was reading a chapter of a book on mysticism and physics, and in this chapter the author described Chinese religious and philosophical thought as taking place between the poles of Taoism and Confucianism. This point was actually summed up ably by Stephen Prothero in that column of his I linked to yesterday.…

Via Jonah Lehrer, here’s a Vanity Fair excerpt from Michael Lewis’s new book, in which a one-eyed California man who always thought his social awkwardness was due to his partial blindness, and who stumbled into becoming a very rich investor. Turns out that his undiagnosed Asperger Syndrome is what accounted for his extraordinary investing skills.…

Tired of the epistemic closure discussion? Me neither. A Texas reader sends along this post from the excellent science writer/blogger Jonah Lehrer, who discusses how becoming enculturated within a particular group involves epistemic closure. Excerpt: The process of enculturation doesn’t just afflict middle-aged scientists, struggling to appreciate a new anomaly. It’s a problem for any…

John O’Sullivan, commenting on Gordon Brown’s gaffe: What makes this much more than simply embarrassing for Labour is that it illustrates the private contempt of Left elites for ordinary Labour voters, with their old-fashioned patriotic and conservative social prejudices on immigration and much else. I think this is true, and it’s true in America as…

A Canadian oil spill expert tells the BBC today that the Louisiana oil spill is going to dwarf the Exxon Valdez disaster, and with the possible exception of the Kuwait oil field fires following the first Gulf War, will be the worst oil field disaster in history. Meanwhile, it turns out that the damaged deep-water…

Religion scholar Stephen Prothero says what really needs saying more often. Excerpt: No one argues that different economic systems or political regimes are one and the same. Capitalism and socialism are so self-evidently at odds that their differences hardly bear mentioning. The same goes for democracy and monarchy. Yet scholars continue to claim that religious…

At Commonweal’s blog, former Newsweek religion writer Kenneth Woodward let’s the Times have it, comparing the newspaper to a religion. Excerpt: Again like the Church of Rome, the Times exercises a powerful magisterium or teaching authority through its editorial board. There is no issue, local or global, on which these (usually anonymous) writers do not…

My Templeton colleague Dave Thomas notes that even computers need a “Sabbath” (i.e., time to rest), but people these days seem to think there’s something wrong with rest. Excerpt: This is compounded by an always-on society. The ability to be constantly networked suggests the need to be constantly networked. Just ask these University of Maryland…
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