The new Pope has spoken movingly about the exploitation of all beings, particularly of farmed animals. When he was asked about the rights of animals in a 2002 interview, he said, “That is a very serious question. At any rate, we can see that they are given into our care, that we cannot just do…

Here’s a good example of how “free trade” agreements are often anything but: For American drug companies, this agreement [i.e. CAFTA] extends the time period during which brand-name pharmaceuticals have exclusive access to markets, postponing the entry of generic drugs and thus limiting competition. For Central Americans, the cost of drugs will soar, straining budgets…

The Inquirer has jumped on the trying-to-understand-those-kooky-evangelical-Christians bandwagon, running a series of stories over the past few weeks on various aspects of modern evangelicalism. Yesterday’s paper, though, had two pretty good stories higlighting the often underreported diversity of political views among evangelicals. They emphasized the concerns many have beyond the usual triad of abortion, gay…

Via Eve Tushnet comes this article making the case for trade, rather than aid with Africa. It blames U.S. agricultural subsidies for directly contributing to African poverty (and raising the cost of living for American consumers to boot): U.S. agriculture policy undermines U.S. efforts to alleviate poverty because it drives down global agricultural prices, which…

Marvin has a most excellent post on the creationism vs. evolution debate. I don’t object, in principle, to people pursuing things like “intelligent design” (which is not the same thing as “young earth creationism” or Genesis-literalism). I don’t know enough about it to say what its merits as a theory are; it seems to me…

I don’t claim to understand everything in this John Milbank essay that Russell discussed yesterday (I will assume, as a matter of charity, that it’s my fault and not Milbank’s), but I do have a couple of bones to pick with it. Milbank seems to be contrasting a strawman version of “liberalism” (by which I…

The military is having a tough time meeting recruiting goals I suppose because fewer people want to go get shot at in a war that a majority of Americans now say has not made us safer. What to do? Well, the sensible solution, as offered in this piece by Christopher Preble, would be to scale…

Batman Begins has been getting some glowing reviews. Here’s one from The Onion’s AV Club.

Marcus thinks I was too easy on the Bush administration here. My point, though, was the quite narrow one that there was some justification for beleiving that Saddam posessed some WMD, and that the administration seems to have sincerely beleived he did. I don’t like to speculate about motives since I don’t have access to…

I’m happy to see that the House has voted to strip the PATRIOT (sic!) Act of the provisions which permit the Feds to look at library book and bookstore sale records. Even in the unlikely event that it makes it past the Senate and the President, there are other provisions dealing with search warrants and…