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Rod Dreher

Sam Crane is performing in a community theater production of “Our Town” this summer, and it got him to thinking about Taoist themes in the play. For Taoism, he writes: Th e complex is to be found in the simple, the vast in the minute. This is a central theme in Our Town. The persons…

Yes, according to one study of American children. Excerpt: Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward.…

In mice, that is. So says a new report in the science journal Cell, as reported by Jonah Lehrer. This study involved lab mice injected with cancer cells. Those who were given toys to play with in their cages were better at fighting the cancer than those deprived of toys — this, for reasons that…

I don’t like the burqa. In fact, I think it’s appalling. I don’t like what it says about the place of women in the societies where it’s common. I like that the imam of the Grand Mosque of Paris says that the burqa (niqab, etc.) has no place in Islam — meaning, that it’s a…

Via The Browser, here’s a really good slice-of-life portrait of a small, rural Kentucky town where most people are obese. Excerpts: The residents of this town of 2,100 — 95 miles southeast of Lexington and deep in the Appalachian foothills — indeed appear to celebrate the joys of community closeness. The bake sales, the volunteering.…

I hadn’t looked in on the Cosimanian Orthodox gloomster The Ochlophobist in ages, and so enjoyed it that I made a note to bookmark his site. I also found there links to the blog of one Arturo Vasquez, a Catholic who makes pithy, wise, pessmistic observations. Such as this one, which I offer for discussion:…

When I heard the first audio clip of one of Mel Gibson’s crazy calls to his girlfriend — the angry, racist rant — I deliberately chose not to post it, though it was disgusting. I thought it ethically proper not to participate in broadcasting a private phone message now made public, however ugly I found…

David Rieff has a good reflection on the limits of humanitarian interventionism. This passage from it caught my eye: In 1940, as the Wehrmacht marched into Paris, Simone Weil wrote in her journal, “[T]his is a great day for the people of Indochina.” The remark is generally greeted with horror, by respectable opinion in Western…

I was e-mailing this morning with a secular atheist liberal writer acquaintance who is working on a piece about why so many fellow secular liberals refuse, in her view, to face the plain facts about Islamism and Islamic radicalism. I mentioned to her some of my experiences with fellow journalists, who were absolutely immovable on…

Here’s the best five minutes you’re likely to spend today: Jon Stewart’s interview with novelist Marilynne Robinson, discussing science and religion and her new book “Absence of Mind.” Robinson’s basic view is that scientistic reductionists claim too much for science, and offer a cartoonish, straw-man version of religion for the sake of dismissing it. “At…
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