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Rod Dreher

This extraordinary passage from (the Catholic) Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal column today. She recaps how American bishops reacted at first to the 2002 scandals, and then says: Does any of this, the finger-pointing and blame-gaming, sound familiar? Isn’t it what we’ve been hearing the past few weeks? At the end of [a 2002 Noonan…

How did this happen? Who on earth could have seen this coming?: It turns out a crowded museum, like a crowded subway, is no excuse for an improper touch. This lesson has been learned the hard way by some visitors to “The Artist is Present,” the Marina Abramovic retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art,…

“How little we know, how eager to learn.” — Sir John Templeton Tim Burke: There’s really very little to be said for trying to carry on a conversation (online or otherwise) with people who have nothing but an instrumental view of conversation as a means to their own anti-pluralistic or illiberal ends, who concern-troll every…

Here at Templeton, we have this week posted our newest Big Question series of essays from major thinkers, all answering the same question. The new one is: “Does moral action depend on reasoning?” Go here to read all the answers. Contributors include Robbie George, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Jonah Lehrer, Stanley Fish, Joshua…

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church: 2284 Scandal is an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil. The person who gives scandal becomes his neighbor’s tempter. He damages virtue and integrity; he may even draw his brother into spiritual death. Scandal is a grave offense if by deed or omission another is…

Niraj Chokshi: Almost one fourth of people under 25 now watch most of their TV online. The authors of a new survey estimate that 800,000 U.S. households got rid of their cable subscriptions last year, and expect the number to double by the end of 2011. The loss is still small, given the 101 million…

So says woman farmer Sharon Astyk, writing in In Character. Excerpt: I was not raised on a farm. My parents or grandparents were NOT farmers. My husband comes NOT from farming people but from an apartment in New Jersey. Both of us are overeducated people who trained for firmly non-agrarian careers: my husband teaches astrophysics…

Heather Mac Donald, writing in City Journal, criticizes a New York City program to help the poor by giving them cash rewards for constructive behavior, saying it’s built on a misunderstanding of why inner-city Americans (versus, say, Mexicans) are poor. Excerpt: Of course, it’s ludicrous to suppose that what keeps America’s inner-city residents poor across…

Somebody secretly records a drunken Jerry Jones, the Dallas Cowboys owner, talking trash about Bill Parcells and others in a bar, and WFAA, the ABC affiliate in Dallas, runs it as a story. This royally cheesed off WFAA’s veteran sports anchor Dale Hansen, who thought it a serious breach of journalistic ethics. Hansen went on…

New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade has made a Darwinian case for the religion instinct. From Commonweal’s mostly favorable review of Wade’s book: Again, religion is important to Wade only because it is biologically adaptive: it has fostered the survival of populations of human genes from one generation to the next. Embracing a neo-Darwinian…
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