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From Brandon at Siris: I think blogging constantly about politics is mentally unhealthy, inevitably warps one’s priorities, and distracts from the fact that politics is merely one necessary condition of the good life, and not even the most important. Read more

Oxford University Press is publishing a pocket version of Phyllis Tickle’s popular Divine Hours series (an adaptation of the Daily Office/Liturgy of the Hours), which sounds like a worthwhile project. I couldn’t help, though, but snicker at this line on the book’s website page: “Tickle draws her texts primarily from the Book of Common Prayer Read more

Chip Frontz rightly chastises me for not providing more context to the Milton Friedman quote below. Here’s the rest of the exchange from the WSJ interview with Prof. Friedman and his wife Rose, a distinguished economist in her own right: Does it disappoint Mr. Friedman that the Bush administration hasn’t been able to roll back Read more

“What’s really killed the Republican Party isn’t spending, it’s Iraq. As it happens, I was opposed to going into Iraq from the beginning. I think it was a mistake, for the simple reason that I do not believe the United States of America ought to be involved in aggression.” – Milton Friedman Read more

Very funny (and well done!), via Mrs. VI. Read more

This is interesting – Maryland’s independent Senate candidate Kevin Zeese has been endorsed by the state’s Green, Populist, and Libertarian parties, essentially creating a left-right fusion ticket. Zeese is emphasizing a populist-based opposition to the Iraq war, ending the war on drugs, cutting corporate welfare, defense of civil liberties, election reform, and shoring up Social Read more

“Hot and Bothered: Facing up to Global Warming” by Bill McKibbon. Now that global warming denial seems to be crumbling – even former skeptics are coming around – what will we do about it? And what kind of role should churches play? “Theocracy! Theocracy! Theocracy!” at First Things. Ross Douthat reviews the recent spate of Read more

This is an interesting argument from the Catholic legal blog Mirror of Justice to the effect that destroying embryos for research is worse than abortion. Of course, the argument won’t cut any ice with you if you don’t think that the embryo has some kind of moral standing, but I’m not particularly interested in revisiting Read more

There’s been quite a bit of discussion about appropriate church attire among the blogs I read (see here, here and here) stemming from a pastoral letter from a Catholic bishop in Texas urging modest dress in church (though most of the disputants in the above linked posts are not Catholic). Personally, I’ve learned through long Read more

I’ve made no secret of my disgruntlement with many aspects of the Bush administration’s policy (foreign and domestic), but it seems to me that I should praise the President when he does something I agree with. At the risk of seeming too positive, I can think of about a half-dozen occasions before this off the Read more