I learned yesterday that a fairly recent acquaintance had died. He was 15 years younger than me, and found dead in his bed. He had joined our contradance group this year, so was in better than average health. This sort of event generally leads to sober thoughts. But, why? Lloyds…
What does it mean to call President Bush a Manichean warrior? Glenn Greenwald explains, in this interview with Bill Moyers: Well, the idea of being a Manichean comes from this third century BC philosophy that--or religion really that--basically understood the world, a never-ending battle between the forces of pure good…
Rod Blogojevich is not a big fish by any means. Most of the big fish remain nameless and free, according to Frank Rich of the NYT: What went down in the Land of Lincoln is just the reductio ad absurdum of an American era where both entitlement and corruption have…
You'd never know that there was an energy crisis in South St. Louis, based on the extravagant use of Christmas lighting. My family and I walked through one neighborhood that pushed the envelope even further than the usual level of extravagance, drawing dozens of cars. The tradition is apparently to…
Now that he doesn't need the evangelicals to get elected (and now that John McCain doesn't need them either), George W. Bush can safely say the the Bible is "probably not literally true." In a recent interview on ABC with Charles Gibson, Bush freely admits that Muslims can go to…