As legions of do-gooders (or people looking for a free concert) descended on Philadelphia this weekend, the wife and I took the opportunity to beat it out of there for some R & R. We ended up in Jim Thorpe, PA, a town of about 5,000 souls in the foothills of the Poconos. The town,…

Interesting piece from the Washington Post trying to get the views of ordinary Africans on what they think would be helpful: Peter Kanans, a coffee farmer whose house has no running water and a leaking roof, said he had a message for the leaders of the world’s richest countries who will meet at the G-8…

Here’s a sharp column by newish NY Times-ter John Tierney. Some key bits: The natural impulse to dislike outsiders is so strong that it barely matters who the outsiders are. When experimental psychologists divide subjects into purely arbitrary groups – by the color of their eyes, their taste in art, the flip of a coin…

Justice O’Connor is retiring. You can read about some of her possible replacements here. Expect a lot of apocalyptic language from both sides telling us that the fate of our nation hinges on who’s appointed to replace her. I certainly have my opinions and preferences on these matters, but I also think it’s helpful to…

Here’s an article denouncing “communist chic” (“CCCP” t-shirts, a vodka bar chain called “the Soviet,” even a Stalin theme park in Lithuania!). We’re all familiar with the ubiquitous Che Guevera t-shirts. Yesterday I saw one that was new to me – a Ho Chi Minh t-shirt (I might be a little afraid of running into…

Jennifer has a good post on poverty: I’m not a humanist; I’m a Christian. I believe that poverty is caused by sin and that “our struggle is not against enemies of flesh and blood, but against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, agaisnt the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly…

The President “is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation’s armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do…

I came across this passage in Fr. Capon’s An Offering of Uncles (my copy is from the collection The Romance of the Word) and thought it was worth pondering: In the interest of making a hasty accomodation between a stale biblical chronology and a half-baked theory of universal evolution, all kinds of things were said…

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy,…

William Saletan draws an interesting parallel.