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Rod Dreher

Soooo … the iPad is announced. What think ye? There’s such a hurricane of information and analysis I hardly know what to say. I’m also a minor Apple cult member — minor because though I’m not evangelical about all things Apple, I have drunk the Jobsian Kool-Aid, and basically trust Apple in all things. That…

Reader Helen sent a link to this discussion from a NYT blog entry asking whether or not a parent should cure his child’s Down syndrome if a cure became available. My first response is, “Absolutely” — but it turns out that the discussion is rather more complicated. A mother of children with Down responded to…

I keep trying to come up with something snarky or insightful to say about this story, but I can’t improve on the hilarity of the thing itself. Excerpt: Calling his mission “yoga for the Everyman,” Mr. Romanelli, 36, plays Grateful Dead songs during class, wears sweat pants rather than spandex, and has already experimented with…

Sharon Astyk contemplates what her own “Zombietopia” — that is, her idealized apocalypse — would look like. I especially like these features: 10. My children will recognize that this is a heroic and important moment, and rise nobly to the cause, behaving gracefully under pressure. They will not whine, pick their noses at meetings or…

Via Kathryn Jean Lopez, an exchange between a Unitarian minister and Christopher Hitchens: [Unitarian;] The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for…

Heard this on the radio the other night, and now Reader Oliver sends the video. Excellent stuff:

Behold, an argument that Twitter can make us better writers of oratory. Excerpt: Even the best of [Obama’s West Point] speech is lackluster. Now turn to Cicero’s Philippics, as translated by the wartime code breaker DR Shackleton Bailey 30 years ago, and published late last year by Loeb. Though much is long, and embedded with…

The philosopher A.C. Grayling reviews Martin Jacques’ new book “When China Rules The World.” Jacques believes that the West will decline relative to China’s rise, and China will bring forth a different kind of modernity onto the world stage. Grayling is skeptical of this, and suggests that China is living out a 21st-century version of…

Just up on the Templeton Foundation’s YouTube channel is a nine-part conversation between the eminent primatologist and psychologist Frans de Waal and Discover magazine’s Carl Zimmer about de Waal’s celebrated new book, “The Age of Empathy.” Note especially the final segment, in which de Waal talks about empathy’s “dark side.” He explains that a successful…

Did you hear the latest revelation about the spiritual life of the late Pope John Paul II? Excerpt: Pope John Paul II not only practiced severe bodily penance – including whipping himself with a belt and sleeping on the floor- but also wrote a letter in which he offered his resignation in the case he…
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