All the ink spilled over Cindy Sheehan and Pat Robertson over the last few weeks seems pretty trivial now doesn’t it?

Just another quick post to highlight some hurricane relief efforts. Here is a good list of organizations. This site has some tips on giving wisely and effectively. Some specific church groups providing relief: ELCA Disaster ResponseCatholic CharitiesMethodist ReliefPresbyterian Disaster AssistanceMennonite Central Committee

The New Pantagruel is trying to push the boundaries of what might constitute authentically “conservative” thought by posting brief summations of various “tendencies” (ideologies would be too strong) that have existed throughout American history, but mostly at the margins. The articles are excerpts from the recently published (scratch that: forthcoming) American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia. These…

Andrew J. Bacevich is a Vietnam vet and West Point grad who now teaches International Relations at Boston University. He’s contributed articles to such conservative periodicals as National Review, The Weekly Standard, and First Things. Now Bacevich has written one of the better political books to come out this year. Rather than a shrill anti-Bush…

The good news just keeps rolling in on the health front. First it was that booze is good for the old ticker, then we found out that dark chocolate helps lower blood pressure, now it turns out coffee may help prevent cancer! Some truffles, an espresso, and a glass of bourbon – now that’s my…

Here’s a list of organizations providing relief to victims of Hurricane Katrina. ELCA online donations here.

Heh

Interesting piece from “paleocon” Thomas Fleming in the London Spectator (registration req’d): America has always been a strange place, even to Americans. While most countries are content merely to exist, America is supposed to have a project, a destiny, a divine mission. New England Puritans suffered from the delusion that their little settlement was a…

Pietism gets a bad rap, especially in Lutheran circles it seems. The pietists are reviled by conservatives and liberals alike – the former accuse them of ignoring doctrine, wallowing in subjectivism and emotionalism, and fostering legalism, while the latter deride them as embracing a privatized, individualistic faith that is oblivious to the larger issues of…

Remember when we went to war in Kosovo to protect the heroic freedom-loving Kosovar Albanians from the depredations of the evil Serbs? Right. So, anyway, in the course of reading this story on the UN’s failure to protect the Roma (a.k.a. Gypsies) residing in their refugee camps from lead poisoning, I came across this little…