An interesting article in the Los Angeles Times detailing how badly wrong Robert Mugabe’s supporters in the West have been from the very beginning (requires “free” registration; may I suggest BugMeNot?): From the beginning of his political career, Mugabe was not just a Marxist but one who repeatedly made clear his intention to run Zimbabwe as an authoritarian, one-party state. Characteristic of this historical revisionism is former Newsweek southern Africa correspondent Joshua Hammer, writing recently in the liberal Washington Monthly...

Awhile back, I finished reading Armand Nicholi’s book, The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life. Dr. Nicholi is an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard and has taught a seminar on Freud & Lewis at Harvard for the past 35 years. The course eventually led to this book and a PBS series by the same name. The book is an interesting read for anyone modestly interested in one or...

These two brief essays provide a good juxtaposition of two perspectives that view immediate and mandated action to reduce carbon emissions as either morally obligatory or imprudent. For the former, see Vaclav Havel’s, “Our Moral Footprint,” which states rhetorically, “It is also obvious from published research that human activity is a cause of change; we just don’t know how big its contribution is. Is it necessary to know that to the last percentage point, though? By waiting for incontrovertible precision,...

A quote from T. H. Green, refuting the view that the law’s “only business is to prevent interference with the liberty of the individual,” construed as doing what you like as long as it does not infringe on others’ rights to do what they want. Green writes: The true ground of objection to ‘paternal government’ is not that it violates the ‘laissez faire’ principle and conceives that its office is to make people good, to promote morality, but that it...

Orlando Patterson, professor of sociology at Harvard University, penned a challenging piece on Jena 6 and our current racial tensions. I have learned much from Patterson over the years. For example, he was the first person to help me realize that we often confuse issues of race and class in America by assuming the race as the single variable accounting for the cyclical plight of poor blacks. In a September 30th New York Times op-ed piece Patterson rightly says that...

Excerpts from Clifford Krauss’ article in the New York Times (cross-posted at )… The ethanol boom of recent years — which spurred a frenzy of distillery construction, record corn prices, rising food prices and hopes of a new future for rural America — may be fading. Only last year, farmers here spoke of a biofuel gold rush, and they rejoiced as prices for ethanol and the corn used to produce it set records. panies and farm cooperatives have built so...

Related to last week’s post about Reformed education and Pentecostalism, I point you to this post by Rod Dreher, who discusses his interview with Josiah Idowu-Fearon, the Anglican Archbishop of Kaduna state in Nigeria. Dreher relates the following: Pentecostalism is growing like wildfire, but there’s less to it than you might think. He said that in many cases, people are drawn to the emotional experience, and can tell you exactly when they gave their life to Jesus — but can’t...

Why might there be “increasing participation by religious organizations in offering substance abuse treatment funded by federal government vouchers”? Perhaps because, at least in part, “A program’s faith element relates to the people they serve and the type of help they provide, as programs with more explicit and mandatory faith-related elements are likely to be substance-abuse programs.” Thus, the more explicitly faith-filled substance abuse programs will increasingly face a special temptation to take federal funds for such purposes. And this...

You are probably aware by now that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has published a memoir. The interview-avoiding judge has lately been giving, as Kathryn Jean Lopez puts it, “a lifetime of interviews.” Given the controversy surrounding his public life since his nomination to the Court, not much remains to be said about him, good or bad, that has not already been said. Suffice it to say that I draw attention to him now because: 1) My own view is...

"Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?" [John 6:9] Among all the many good things going on last weekend in Boise, I (and a few others) noticed something a bit disconcerting. The way many of the topics were covered shows how prone Christians are to being consumed by doom and gloom messages of scarcity and lack and overpopulation and an "ever smaller earth." While it’s...