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).…

Christopher Shea follows up on the controversy surrounding the report from a British journal that claimed that casualties from the Iraq war have reached around 100,000: Here’s how the study worked: The researchers randomly selected 33 towns or neighborhoods distributed throughout Iraq’s 18 “directorates,” or local regions. The Iraqi staffers drove to those towns or…

The post-election conventional wisdom that “values voters” swung the election to President Bush is finally receiving some critical scrutiny. John Hood of the John Locke Foundation offers some pretty persuasive analysis: The problem with all this is that, while comforting to many Kerry supporters and exhilarating for some social-conservative leaders, the notion that Bush won…

In yet another article on our divided electorate Michael Kinsley writes: It’s true that people on my side of the divide want to live in a society where women are free to choose and where gay relationships have civil equality with straight ones. And you want to live in a society where the opposite is…

If you’re a libertarian (as I once thought I was) or just interested in libertarian ideas, you might be interested in this debate between minarchist and anarchist libertarians. The participants include Charles Murray (he of the (in)famous Bell Curve) and economist David Friedman (son of Milton). As far as I’m concerned, the anarchists are wrong…

Beliefnet‘s Steven Waldman is, as usual, full of good sense: Let’s be clear about who these “values voters” were in 2004. Somewhere between 30 percent and 40 percent of Americans are born-again Christians. About 15 percent of the population is religious conservatives of the sort we used to call the “religious right.” The other born-agains…

President Bush’s re-election doesn’t mean that real differences don’t still exist within the broader conservative movement. The NYT reports here on the continuing struggle between conservatives who supported the Iraq war and the “antiwar Right”: The euphoria of Mr. Bush’s victory postponed the battle, but not for long. Now that Mr. Bush has secured re-election,…

Reason‘s Tim Cavanaugh reports on the G.K. Chesterton Society and considers the virtues and vices of GKC as a writer.

Matthew Yglesias has two good posts that should both please and challenge Christians. First: Mark Schmitt is bored of all the Jesusland business and wants to ask the right question about religion, namely “why it is that the current flourishing of religious faith has, for the first time ever, virtually no element of social justice?”…