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Rod Dreher

Some time ago, I read something, can’t remember where, about Tibetan Buddhism. The author may have been a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism; I just don’t recall. Anyway, the writer said that in the West, we have a completely romanticized view of Tibetan Buddhism, one that ignores the dark and violent side of the tradition. If…

You know how little kids, maybe at the age of three, start asking questions that are hard to answer? My kid Matthew is 10, but he’s at that stage again — except this time, he offers what he calls “theories,” and then expects to talk about them. It’s kind of fun, because no matter how…

Given those gruesome numers, why are we even arguing about whether or not to extend unemployment benefits? Via Scott Winship, who said looking at this chart made him “much more sympathetic” to the idea of extending unemployment benefits.

That earlier GMO Eucharist thread got taken over by a discussion of gluten and celiac disease. I will re-post these lines from Ocholophobist, quoted in the original post, in hopes that y’all will want to discuss it here: [T]here is something disheartening in having to go to an upscale store or the upscale aisle at…

Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston are going to get married. It says something about our screwed-up culture that they announced this in an exclusive cover story for US magazine, but anyway, there it is. Our curmudgeonly friend John E. Agnostic Stoic sent the news, saying that it warmed his cynical heart. My first thought was,…

Does the BP oil disaster threaten to turn into a methane volcano that threatens doomsday? This guy thinks so. Excerpt: Ominous reports are leaking past the BP Gulf salvage operation news blackout that the disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico may be about to reach biblical proportions. 251 million years ago a mammoth undersea…

Many religions have laws governing ritual purity. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, ruled that under its own laws, a gluten-free wheat wafer cannot be used to confect the Eucharist. Unless you are a canonist or otherwise versed in this sort of thing, please, reader, spare me complaints about this. It is just as parochial…

My three children are all fairly different in their dispositions. The oldest one is stormy and intellectual. The youngest, she’s complicated and dramatic. The middle child, Lucas, who is six, is sunshiny by nature. I can tell, even at this young age, that he’s going to be the rock of the family in his generation.…

It’s Bastille Day. You know the drill:I’m in a pickle: a Francophile who thinks that despite the corruption of the ancien regime, that the Revolution of 1789 was a disaster. Still, I don’t sing the revolutionary anthem because I support the Jacobins. I sing it because I love France. I wish all French people, and…

When I was a kid in the 1970s, I followed professional baseball. George Steinbrenner was the personification of baseball evil to me: rich, arrogant as hell, and from New York. I lost interest in baseball as a teenager, and with that lost my attitude about the Yankees. Years later, when I lived in New York…
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