My wife proved herself a prophetess last night. Despite the prognosticators, she confidently proclaimed that the Dixie Chicks would be winners at the Grammy’s–though I don’t think she envisioned them winning 5 awards (in every category for which they were nominated). There is, of course, a sweet irony about this. This trio that won “Best…
In rolling out his campaign for nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards sounds like…well, a Democrat! It’s quite jarring to hear when one has become used to the basically right- and centrist-B.S. that passes for Democratic rhetoric in the wake of Bill Clinton. But the New York Times reports: Appearing on “Meet the…
For the first time in my memory, our city is experiencing a “snow day” on a Sunday (yes, my kids think God is playing a cruel joke by dumping a blizzard on the weekend!). All of the local churches, because of what’s being hailed by sensationalistic local media as “The Blizzard of ’07,” are closed…
Jeff Sharlet’s most recent essay in Harper’s focuses on yet another front in the Religious Right’s strategy for the culture wars (in addition to the courts, the marriage altar, and science classrooms): U.S. history. At stake here is just how we narrate the story of the American experiment. The Right clearly sees the power of…
Christopher Hitchens has, notoriously, come to a kind of tepid “defense” of the work of David Irving, who is in turn notoriously charged as a Holocaust denier, or at least revisionist. (See “The Strange Case of David Irving,” in Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War.) Hitchens’ willingness to even have his name appear in a sentence…
The Martin Marty Center’s Sightings post for today is a brilliant piece by Elizabeth Musselman on carbon offsets as the new “indulgences”–a mode of cheap grace that assuages guilt without requiring any change of lifestyle (sort of like the Bush plan to find new drugs for the American addiction to oil, rather than curtail the…