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…

Twisted: Animal rights activists have held a protest in Canada at the premiere of a documentary about three art students who videoed themselves killing a cat. Demonstrators urged ticket-holders at the Toronto Film Festival to boycott Casuistry: The Art of Killing a Cat. The documentary shows interviews with artists, police and activists – but not…

Generally, I think the strongest argument against pacifism is it’s immoral. Namely, we abandon the innocent who should be protected. Just war is committed to believing that you cannot commit an evil that a good may come. You cannot bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s better for more people to die on the beaches of Japan…

It may be asked whether, faint as the hope is of abolishing war by Pacifism, there is any other hope. But the question belongs to a mode of thought which I find quite alien to me. It consists in assuming that the great permanent miseries in human life must be curable if only we can…