People
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Obviously Robert Byrd was a complicated man. He went from being a segregationist (and Klan member!) to an ardent champion of civil rights and supporter of Barack Obama’s election. He also went from being a supporter of the Vietnam war to a fierce critic of of presidential warmaking and executive power, giving eloquent and impassioned Read more
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Stewart Udall, who was Secretary of the Interior during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, died this weekend. I didn’t really know anything about him before reading this obituary in today’s WaPo, but his accomplishments as head of Interior were impressive. I was more struck, though, by some of the language he used. It’s hard to Read more
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This New Yorker profile of Justice John Paul Stevens shows what a loss to the Supreme Court his (probably impending) retirement will be. My wife clerked for Stevens in 2007-2008, and I got to meet him on one occasion. He came across as a very gracious and obviously brilliant man. The article is also a Read more
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Maybe people who are a bit younger only remember Michael Jackson as the weirdo, quasi-hermit he later became. But at the peak of his popularity (I was, I think, in third grade when Thriller came out) he was about the most exciting thing on the planet. Anyway, MJ skeptics, go watch. p.s. Andrew Sullivan has Read more
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I was offline for most of the day yesterday and missed this good post from Matt Yglesias on King and nonviolence (via Marvin). Read more
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The co-founder and longtime editor of First Things, and noted conservative polemicist, has passed away at age seventy-two. I’ve drifted away from reading FT over the last few years, partly because it seems to me to have embraced a more down-the-line conservative ideology than before (whether that says more about them or me is debatable). Read more
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The well-known teacher and theologian has died at the untimely age of 60. I only knew him through his books, but he was by all accounts a wonderful teacher and a good Christian man. He spent the vast majority of his career at tiny Wabash College in Indiana; as a leading light of Yale-style “postliberal” Read more
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An esteemed Anglican scholar and ecumenist passes. The obituary by Rowan Williams is here (via Derek). For what it’s worth: I highly recommend his history of the early church and Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition. Highly readable works that wear their (ample) scholarship lightly. Read more
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I enjoyed his writing even though I dissented from his brand of conservatism, and he always struck me as an honorable and charitable fellow. For better or worse, he hugely influenced American politics. RIP. Read more
A Thinking Reed 