Inspiration Faith & Prayer Health & Wellness Entertainment Love & Family
Newsletters Special Offers

Rod Dreher

Folks have asked me for the recipes I’m going to use for my Louisiana cooking this weekend. The truth is, I’m not sure. I can’t find all my cookbooks in our giant pile o’ stuff as yet unpacked, and I’m not entirely satisfied with the recipes I have found (Paul Prudhomme’s cookbooks, two of which…

So says Robert Wright. Excerpt: The new information technology doesn’t just create generation-3.0 special interests; it arms them with precision-guided munitions. The division of readers and viewers into demographically and ideologically discrete micro-audiences makes it easy for interest groups to get scare stories (e.g. “death panels”) to the people most likely to be terrified by…

Syncretism in our time, in the home of a former Lutheran pastor and her husband, who are now worshiping voodoo spirits: CHICAGO – Images of the washed-out Haitian hillside where their children’s relatives lived have led Peter and Paula Fitzgibbons to fear that their adopted son and daughter have no biological family left. The strongest…

I have avoided blogging about gay marriage since starting this new blog, because without fail, gay marriage threads on Crunchy Con were examples of 99 percent heat/1 percent light. This new blog is not meant to be polemical, especially not on the usual culture war issues. Today, though, I came across a story that is…

Regular readers know that I hold anthropologist Wade Davis in high esteem, as I’ve been quoting extensively and approvingly from his new book “The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World.” As one would expect, he excoriated televangelist Pat Robertson for musing that the Haitian earthquake may have struck because the ancestors of…

This morning on the way in I was listening to an old episode of the unfailingly excellent and indispensable Mars Hill Audio Journal, in which sociologist Christian Smith discussed his findings about American youth and Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. I was struck by the part of his discussion with host Ken Myers about how American teenagers…

Things just keep getting worse for Toyota. Now there’s a problem with the brakes on some Priuses. Do you drive a Toyota affected by the recall? If so, how are you dealing with it? It seems to me that the chances of your Toyota falling victim to a bad brake pedal is vanishingly small ……

So, we’ve been in a big day-long meeting at the Foundation, and one of the things I learned was about how we helped fund Dr. Paul Zak’s research into the role the brain chemical oxytocin plays in warm, fuzzy emotions. I just googled up a Zak blog post in which he describes how a con…

That’s the question the Templeton Foundation posed to an array of smart people (e.g., Jagdish Bhagwati, Bernard-Henri Levy, John Gray, Michael Walzer, Michael Novak, Kay Hymowitz, and others) a while ago. Their diverse answers, including some videotaped responses, are archived here. It’s well worth spending some time perusing the various arguments. I incline to John…

Now this sounds like a book I want to read. Excerpt from the NYT review: The best book blurb I’m aware of came from Roy Blount Jr., who said about Pete Dexter’s 1988 novel, “Paris Trout”: “I put it down once to wipe off the sweat.” I’m not sure I know what that means. Was…
archives most recent
search this blog
More from Beliefnet and our partners