My more detailed response to last week’s NYT editorial defending chimera research is posted over at WorldMagBlog. ...

Political leaders in Europe who have tied their fortunes to the creation of the new EU superstate are now dismissing the growing sentiment against the metastasizing, power-hungry bureaucracy in Brussels as “whims of changing opinion polls or referendums.” That’s from German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who finds it increasingly difficult to bully his countrymen into the deal. Here’s how a story in Der Spiegel describes the mood of voters: Citizens are quickly ing wary of the transfer of power to a...

This story from The Boston Globe (via Arts & Letters Daily) relects on the changing place of tobacco in contemporary American society. The efforts of various municipalities and anti-smoking activists have largely managed to turn the cigarette into a symbol of knavery rather than gentry. As A.S. Hamrah recounts, “Smokers were once thought to make the best conversationalists, the best soldiers, even the best husbands.” The merits of tobacco have been celebrated, for example, by J.R.R. Tolkien in his Lord...

In a row over the Freedom of Information Act, Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick‘s administration has finally acknowledged expense information first requested by media outlets nearly two years ago. According to the Detroit Free Press, documents were turned over last month, “But in dozens of instances, pages were missing, or information on the city-supplied records was blacked out.” Now that the Free Press has obtained unedited plete copies of the parison of the two sets of papers shows, “The information blacked...

Rev. Gerald Zandstra, director of programs at the Acton Institute, has taken a leave of absence to enter the race for the U.S. Senate. This story quotes Jerry, and sizes up the campaign. ...

Thorny issues arise when non-profits take government funding, especially when said non-profits have an explicitly Christian (and evangelistic) purpose. Case in point: “The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit yesterday against the Department of Health and Human Services, accusing the Bush administration of spending federal tax dollars on an abstinence education program that promotes Christianity,” aka Silver Ring Thing. I first heard about the Silver Ring Thing via a special documentary broadcast on NPR, “With This Ring: Pledging Abstinence.” All...

Here’s a list of the current members of the President’s Council on Bioethics, whose interest area is sure to e more and more important ing years, courtesy The Thing Is. ...

Why do so many protestors in the anti-globalization movement seem to have such a big appetite for the products panies such as Nokia, Seiko, Nissan, Volvo, Toshiba, and the like? Maybe it’s because, as Anthony Bradley writes, their paternalistic views about the poor and the developing world blind them to the reality of the global economy. Bradley uses Japan as an example of how international trade can boost a relatively weak economy and speed up the process of ing an...

In a profile of Mike Gerson, an evangelical Christian and chief speechwriter for President Bush, Karl Rove summarized Gerson’s contributions thusly: “You can count on Mike to ask how a given policy will affect the least among us,” Rove said in an interview. “The shorthand, political way to say it is that Mike is the one always wondering how we can achieve liberal goals with conservative means.” Of course this the “political way” to get at it, but Rove’s expression...

In the hurly-burly of the last few months, I had missed the release of the new critical edition of Dietrich Bonheoffer’s Ethics, the latest in the massive Augsburg Fortress project, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works. My notification came via the International Bonhoeffer Society’s newsletter, which arrived yesterday. Rest assured that I purchased my copy today and am eagerly awaiting its arrival. ...

This article from The Christian Post relates the warnings of Martin Oca༚, professor at the Baptist Seminary of South Peru, about the increasing attraction of prosperity theology in Latin America. According to Oca༚, prosperity theology (PT) teaches that, material prosperity is the greatest evidence of God’s blessing. However…such prosperity is not for everyone but rather for those who are faithful to God and keep His spiritual laws. He also says PT teaches that material prosperity is given to Christians so...

This article is a must-read for anyone interested in the recent history of American evangelicalism: For a movement that began its modern life among the Calvinists, the sometimes strong critique evangelicalism has received in the past decade from its own Calvinist caucus cannot be dismissed lightly. While most of these Calvinist voices have not distanced themselves from the movement they helped create, their accusations of doctrinal declension, human-centered worship and idolatrous narcissism stand in sharp contrast to the more upbeat...