Here’s Wesley J. Smith on the latest developments in the “right to die” movement: The international euthanasia movement’s first principle is radical individualism. The idea is that we each own our own body and hence should be able to do what we choose with our physical self — including destroy it. Not only that, but…

Will Wilkinson: We’ve all seen, and have grown weary of, the wide array of red/blue/purple political maps. The purplish tones are supposed to show us, I guess, that even a “red state” is a mix of red and blue people. It’s not binary: all red or all blue. Yes. I guess. But the thing that…

Jennifer at Scandal of Particularity has an answer for those who want religious believers to butt out of public affairs: …I reject the position that I have my opinion, and you have yours, and thus you should not attempt to force your “opinion” on mine. (Kind of a “get your rosaries off my ovaries” slogan…

Commenter Jonathan at Pontifications says: Nevertheless I promise that I will join with Fr Freeman and Fr Hart when their respective Churches [i.e. Rome and Orthodoxy] are again One. No justification could ever exist for not belonging to the Great Church if and when it is reunited after the schism of 1054. I wonder how…

Which means I can indulge one of my guilty pleasures tonight. Also see here.

Things are not off to a good start. Now that that favorite hate-object of the left, John Ashcroft, has resigned, President Bush has nominated former White House counsel and longtime friend Alberto Gonzales for the postion of Attorney General. First we get the condescending ethnic bean-counting angle: President Bush paved the way yesterday for Alberto…

Stephen L. Carter examines the case for “humanitarian” war: [M]ost of us agree that war is morally permissible to defend one’s own country against aggression. There are difficult questions still. (What counts as aggression? May one attack before the enemy strikes?) But wide consensus exists on the general principle of self-defense. The more difficult question,…

Today my wonderful wife gave me the Johnny Cash “Unearthed” box set as a birthday gift. It contains four discs of previously unreleased material from the years of Cash’s collaboration with producer Rick Rubin. After just one listen I think I can safely say that the jewel of this collection is disc four: My Mother’s…

Giving us more anthropological analysis of our political divisions, Grant McCracken suggests a “Marxian” rapprochement between right and left: Another way to begin to close the ideological gap is to see if we can’t fashion a peace treaty for the culture wars. “They just don’t get it” comes in part from the fact that we…

Karl at St. Stephen’s Musings has a post quoting an Orthodox priest on the value of formal prayers in teaching us how to pray: Those formal prayers in the prayer book are the examples of how to pray, they are the “pouring out of the heart” of people who were experienced in prayer (the saints).…