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).…

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…