Bookworm Room

Picture this:  You’re a believing Christian, and you work for a Christian charity that is under the patronage of your country’s major Christian organization.  One of your colleagues, in a private conversation, asks for yours views about your faith. You say that you’re opposed as a doctrinal matter, but that you don’t personally have a [...]

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My son came home from public school the other day complaining that one of his teachers used a history lesson as an opportunity to launch into a short speech about how Obama was going to bring peace to the world.  (Which is true, if you accept that, as Charles Krauthammar points out, Obama is going [...]

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Am I the only one to be a bit surprised by Tony Blair’s chutzpah?  He’s been Catholic for about a year, and he is already presuming to tell the Pope that the Church’s doctrine is wrong and should be changed. Perhaps, ex-PM Blair, you should have converted to a different faith.  After all, it’s not [...]

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The other day, I asked “can it happen here?“  The Radio Patriot reminded me that it is already happening there, in France.  Mark Steyn talked about the demographic destruction of Europe in his book America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It.  But he didn’t include maps.  The most striking thing in [...]

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There’s a row in England over the fact that a kids’ cartoon magazine, published by the Who Cares? Trust, which receives a great deal of public funding, shows a boy wearing a large cross being an Islamophobe, while a hijab clad girl is an articulate, brave defender of human rights.  What struck me about this [...]

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As you know, one of my main reasons for supporting Proposition 8, which amended the California constitution to define marriage as a relationship between one man and one woman, was because I believe that move to redefine marriage has the potential to put the State and religion organizations — especially the Catholic church — into [...]

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I was not thrilled by Bush’s Office on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, since I don’t want the White House involved in faith, but I recognized it as a pragmatic means to increasing the effectiveness of existing religious charities.  I also wasn’t too concerned because I did not see it as a government effort to co-opt [...]

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It’s been an incoherent day, one that never gave me the opportunity for contemplation and writing.  Instead, I’ve been bopping here and there, and dealing with one thing and another.  Nevertheless, I have been tracking the news, so I thought I’d just write up a mish-mash of thoughts about current issues and events. Gaza The [...]

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The New York Times today has a headline story that a group of conservative Episcopalian bishops is breaking away from the mainstream church because of objections to the church’s stand on gay marriage: Conservatives disaffected from the Episcopal Church are expected to declare on Wednesday that they are founding their own rival Anglican province in [...]

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The other day, as part of my “false syllogism” post, I noted the way in which the Left continues to be, as it was in Marx’s heyday, fanatically hostile to religion.  If you doubt me, just check out Patrick’s gimlet eyed examination of Cintra Wilson’s attacks on Palin and other openly religious public figures, as [...]

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For many years, I’ve thought that people confuse fairly neutral conduct with bad motives, resulting in false syllogisms.  I first came to this conclusion after reading John McWhorter’s wonderful Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America.  Although my memories are a bit hazy about the details of the book, I seem to recall reading him [...]

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In the past two days, I’ve read two articles that examine the liberal approach to religion.  The first is Hillel Halkin’s How Not to Repair the World (available to subscribers or for a $2.95 fee); the second is Mark Tooley’s Is God a Liberal Democrat? They were sort of a nice pair to compare to [...]

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It’s an old-fashioned concept: Some horrible disaster happens, and the victims (or the observers) ponder it, and then pronounce, “It’s God’s will.” Nobody would say that now, right? We’re rational, scientifically oriented creatures who search for meaning in everything/ We would never shrug and, Job-like, admit that meaning can elude us and that God can [...]

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Over at National Review, Kathryn Lopez interviews Steven Waldman, who is an editor at BeliefNet.com, and who just wrote a new book: Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America. In it, he carefully examines the way in which the Founders envisioned faith playing out in America, and the way in [...]

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The AP is diving into damage control, assuring us that, not only is Pastor Wright just your ordinary black improvement activist, but his style of rhetoric is dying away anyway: As shocking as they may be, the provocative sermons of Barack Obama’s pastor come out of a tradition of using the black church to challenge [...]

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I love the Anchoress’ blog, which I think is amazingly well-written, intelligent, humorous, humane and full of insight. I therefore find myself in the peculiar position of disagreeing with her twice in as many days. The post at issue is one the Anchoress wrote in the wake of the “aha!” journalism that suddenly sprang up [...]

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