Harry Truman was our president A coke an burger cost you thirty cents I was still in love with Mavis Brown On the night Hank Williams came to town. “I Love Lucy” debuted on TV That was one big event we didn’t see ‘Cause no one stayed at home for miles around It was the…

Forgiveness of sins does not straightaway do for us in this age what we might desire. It does not heal the paralytic; it does not put food on the table; it does not bind up all our hurts and pains. If that is the sum and substance of what is hoped for, forgiveness will never…

From David Gelernter: Has the Republican Congress decreed a U.S. version of the Nuremberg race laws? Has the administration transformed every American news source into a propaganda machine? Demanded that Jews (or anyone) be fired? That Jewish (or any other kind of) shops, businesses, professionals be boycotted? Propaganda posters everywhere? Students thrown out of schools?…

Here’s a thoughtful essay by Ari L. Goldman, former religion reporter for the New York Times, on why, as an Orthodox Jew, he appreciates enforced deprivation from our modern gadget-saturated world during holidays: Growing up Orthodox, there were few things we feared more than the three-day yom tov — that oddity of the Jewish calendar…

Thomas Anger at Liberty Corner takes issue with my criticism of Max Borders’ libertarian (sic) argument for foreign interventionism. First, he denies that war will inevitably lead to an increase in state power at home: I’m not sure about the historical precedent, but there’s plenty of peace and freedom abroad in the U.S. today, in…

Richard Cohen: It’s hard to know whom to loathe more – religious zealots who would censor my reading and deny me the fruits of stem-cell research or fervid hallucinators who belittle Saddam Hussein’s crimes (or even 9/11) and wonder, in the throes of perpetual adolescence, whether the assassination of the President would not amount to…

Story here. It’s been a bad few years for Ramones fans with the passing of Joey and Dee Dee in 2001 and 2002 respectively. This leaves drummer Tommy as the only surviving original member (though he was replaced after a year or so by Marky). Johnny was also that rare bird: the right-wing punk rocker.…

Theologian Alister McGrath has a good essay in this week’s London Spectator on the decline of atheism. Part of it he attributes to the fact that we now know that doing away with God will not automatically lead to peace, freedom and justice (cf. Communism). This makes the rationalist atheism of the 19th-century, say, seem…

Hey, who says conservatives aren’t hip? John J. Miller pens a loving tribute to, er…Iron Maiden at National Review Online. I guess listening to twenty-year old metal albums is one way of standing athwart history yelling “Stop!”…

Then I said truly, Polus that neither you, nor I, nor any man, would rather do than suffer injustice; for to do injustice is the greater evil of the two. — Socrates Despite their disagreement on the permissibility of war, the pacifist and just war traditions agree on a fundamental point that puts them at…