You are a Black Coffee At your best, you are: low maintenance, friendly, and adaptable At your worst, you are: cheap and angsty You drink coffee when: you can get your hands on it Your caffeine addiction level: high What Kind of Coffee Are You? (via Lutheran Chik)

Now I think Peter Singer is a philosophical and moral disaster. He has consistently applied utilitarian principles to argue, for instance, that infanticide is justifiable in some cases, and that human beings are not intrinsically more valuable than other animals. Indeed, I would regard that as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of utilitarianism. Nevertheless,…

One of the great things about a long weekend is the chance to catch up on my reading. I’m one who’ll go to library and check out an armfull of books, intending to get to them all…eventually. This weekend I finally got to John Wesley’s A Simple Account of Christian Perfection. It’s basically a collection…

Open Court Press appears to have stumbled on to a publishing goldmine with their Popular Culture and Philosophy series – each title offers a collection of essays reflecting on some aspect of pop culture. Initially I was suspicious that anything good could come of this, but a friend bought me The Simpsons and Philosopy as…

“Fr. Jape” has a long, rambling, at times snarky, critique of the new “chastity movement” among hip young evangelicals in the latest New Pantagruel. This, however, is a good point: Much of the energy of the purity brigade is generated by the opposite notion—that it is the chaste, rather than the unchaste, who suffer. Thus,…

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…