Having Children Not Eco Friendly According to Some Women

How did we arrive at this place:

"Having children is selfish. It's all about maintaining your genetic line at the expense of the planet"?

Actually, here's one with more gravity...

I couldn't pass up posted a link to this fine piece of writing by Peggy Noonan. It was in Friday's Wall Street Journal Opinion section. It's a commentary on Hillary Clinton and her recent slide in the polls. Noonan compares her to Margaret Thatcher. Here's an excerpt.

The point is the big ones, the real ones, the Thatchers and Indira Gandhis and Golda Meirs and Angela Merkels, never play the boo-hoo game. They are what they are, but they don't use what they are. They don't hold up their sex as a feint: Why, he's not criticizing me, he's criticizing all women! Let us rise and fight the sexist cur.
When Hillary Clinton suggested that debate criticism of her came under the heading of men bullying a defenseless lass, an interesting thing happened. First Kate Michelman, the former head of NARAL and an Edwards supporter, hit her hard. "When unchallenged, in a comfortable, controlled situation, Sen. Clinton embraces her elevation into the 'boys club.' " But when "legitimate questions" are asked, "she is quick to raise the white flag and look for a change in the rules."
Then Mrs. Clinton changed tack a little and told a group of women in West Burlington, Iowa, that they were going to clean up Washington together: "Bring your vacuum cleaners, bring your brushes, bring your brooms, bring your mops." It was all so incongruous--can anyone imagine the 20th century New Class professional Hillary Clinton picking up a vacuum cleaner? Isn't that what downtrodden pink collar workers abused by the patriarchy are for?

Here's the rest.

It's been a while...

I recently checked my blog (the first time in months) and saw a couple of comments from as many readers (my two faithfuls) asking for another post in order to move the mug of Hillary further down the page.

School's keeping me quite busy but I thought I'd post this clip from a favorite old SNL sketch of mine: Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer (starring Phil Hartman--one of my old favorites). Enjoy. (At least it will push Hillary further off the opening page).

unfrozen caveman lawyer

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Girls Just Wanna Have Fun...Hillbilly Style

I really don't have time to do this, but I need to blow off some steam as my entire day has been consumed with the business of getting the school year started.

Below, you'll find a clip of The David Rawlings Machine (which is really--again--just Gillian Welch and Rawlings, but here, with The Machine, Rawlings is the frontman). They're singing a cover of "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" by Cyndi Lauper. Just in case the clip in the last post of their singing "Caleb Meyer" was a little too dark.

Also, if you find this version of "Girls" a little lethargic, give it at least until the last minute of the song when Rawlings does his big solo.

Murder Ballads

I like a good murder ballad. Why? Well, I'm feeling a little too brain dead to get into it right now (from a retreat with students, which was good)--maybe in a later post. In the meantime, why not enjoy this footage of one of my favorites--Gillian Welch and her partner, David Rawlings--singing "Caleb Meyer."



This next one I've written about before. Just listen to the next to the last verse if you find the song a bit unsettling and let the video play out until the end. Cash wrote this years before he recorded it with Rick Rubin.

The Assumption of Mary

August 15 is the day that the Church has traditionally celebrated the Assumption of Mary--the Blessed Virgin's being taken up into heaven without experiencing death. There are a couple of views on how this happened. The Eastern Orthodox Church believes that the Blessed Virgin actually died but was not confined to the grave. Her body was inexplicably removed from its tomb and assumed to heaven. I think the story of one Eastern tradition goes something like this: the same apostle Thomas, who doubted Jesus' resurrection, wanted to see the dead body of Mary after her passing. When they took him to her tomb, the body was gone. The Orthodox do not view this as a resurrection. Rather, Mary's body was simply taken up into heaven as Enoch's and Elijah's were.

The Western Church, on the other hand, has mixed views. The Catholic Church claims that Mary was assumed before she ever died. And from what I understand, this view solidified as the cult of the Virgin grew in popularity in the Western medieval church.

Of course, most Protestant denominations do not recognize Mary's assumption--mostly due to their belief in Sola Scriptura. However, the Anglican church--especially Anglo-Catholic churches--do pay some attention to it--though I believe their observance of it tends to be more private than public (I could be wrong). Lutheran churches, on the other hand, I think, do have a place for its observance in their calendar.

I like the position that the Orthodox take. It is not an official teaching, or dogma, of their church, and seems to be a via media between the Catholic view of perhaps honoring Mary to much and the extreme Protestant view of not viewing her as "Favored One" and "Blessed among women" but as just another one of us. Any thoughts?

Cootie Queen

Stinky McStink Face!

Once

Pseudo Spoiler Alert: I am writing about the movie Once below. I don't give away the ending but I do try to enter into the plot a little to provide some insight into the film. I don't think I give awaytoo much, but you may be really fastidious about what you do and do not know about a film before you see it.

There is a film that is out now that would be worth your seeing: Once. It's a lovely film about a man and a woman and their mutual love for music. The movie is, in fact, a musical of sorts--not the Sound of Music type but a new kind. The characters, played by Glen Hansard (of the Irish rock band The Frames) and Marketa Irglova (who has recently recorded an album with Hansard under the title The Swell Season which contains some of the songs from the movie), tell the story through songs--most of which were composed by Hansard.
What I liked most about the film was the way the music acts as a medium through which the characters approach each other. To paraphrase Wendy Shalit from her 1999 book A Return to Modesty, there was a time when it was widely considered necessarily sexual for a man and woman to simply be alone in a room together. There are plenty of scenes where the two main characters are alone and yet their music (along with a couple of other important checks) acts as a mediator, allowing them to transcend their raw (albeit good) desires for companionship. The music also is the thing that gives the movie an unfulfilling---yet at the same time, fulfilling--ending. I don't want to spoil the whole thing for any of you interested in seeing Once, so please go watch it to see if I'm on to anything.

Poets as Painters

I have, in recent years, been interested in why I am personally more attracted to the particulars of poetry and painting/drawing as opposed to the particulars of music. I took up the guitar in high school and I still play it, but I never could stick with--what I now see to be--the abstraction of music (I'm not talking about what we call lyrics here but what we might call tune). (I also could never muster up the energy to handle the exactitude needed to really learn how to play "my axe"). Stephen Henderson over at Trees Walking has an insightful quotation by the poet Richard Wilbur on this subject. I'll insert a little of it below.

I think I can say why there are more painter-poets, or poets who are would be painters, than there are poets who have to do with music. It strikes me that music is infinitely more abstract then painting or poetry. That you can't make any precise statements as to what music is up to. Poetry simply has to be exact and concrete or it bores to death. And on the whole, I think--despite some successes in abstract painting-that it's the same with painting.

The Masculine Mystique

There are a lot males in my family. I have two older brothers (my poor mother!). My oldest brother now has three sons (the youngest of which you see to the left here with me--I just met him for the first time this past weekend). My other brother and his wife will be welcoming another boy into the family in September.

My wife and I are adopting from Ethiopia. I think we're going to aim for a girl.

Ralph Wood on "Holy Time"

I am attending the Trinity Arts Conference at the University of Dallas this weekend. I listened to Ralph Wood, professor of literature and theology at Baylor, speak about how the Christian story redefines beauty (an element, by the way, that often gets less press in Western churches compared to truth and goodness).

This afternoon, when Wood showed us the Grunewald painting above, someone made a remark about John the Baptist (on the right, pointing) being present in it. I appreciated Wood's response: "Holy time is not chronological time." Wood had just finished talking about the importance of the church calendar to our lives.

Here are some musings based on what Wood said: We need a way of shaping our view of time that is free from the demands of the fiscal year, work year, etc. In the end, what we do in worship is "useless" according to the world's (I mean world in the way John the Revelator used it) understanding. We need something to remind us that work and acquiring "stuff"--dare I say, even acquiring knowledge--is not our ultimate end. We need something to remind us that our Ultimate End is the enjoyment of God--the beatific vision.

For all you Facebookers out there...

China's One-Child Policy

I found this interesting piece about a recent Chinese governmental birth control raid in southern China. Here's a few excerpts:

Residents of this southern China county on Thursday angrily accused authorities of forcing women to have abortions and vandalising homes in a brutal campaign to enforce birth-control policies...

Authorities had even forced women pregnant with their first child to undergo abortions merely because they had not completed paperwork required before getting pregnant, said a woman surnamed Xu, a waitress in a Bobai restaurant that was deserted at lunchtime due to fear pervading the district.
"This has been going on for about three months. The one-child policy is wrong. We are totally against it. I know a woman who committed suicide by jumping in the river because she did not want to be caught by the work teams," Xu said.
A feeling of palpable tension has gripped the area, where deserted roads contrast with bright red-and-white banners and billboards bearing government slogans such as: "Support the one-child policy" and "Happiness is to have one child".

More than a year ago, I posted an entry about this alarming statistic: by 2020, 40 million frustrated Chinese bachelors will have no one to court and marry due to the one-child policy in their country.

The scary thing about China and their desire to modernize and be progressive (and yet still hold on to their nationalistic ideas) is the lack of foresight they exhibit and the seeming inability to learn from history (perhaps because theyhave been closed off from Western history for so long--I don't know). We in the West have learned what happens to over-masculinized (in China's case, literally over-masculinized) cultures: it's called Nazism--with its desire for a perfect race, its nationalistic pride and devaluing of the feminine virtues and so on.

An Opinion Piece about "God's Prior 'Yes'" by Peter Leithart

Here is a very interesting article I found at Reformed News (reprinted there with permission from Leithart's blog). It's an opinion piece by Peter Leithart (Side note: perhaps I read too much Leithart, but most of what he says has the "ring of truth" to me). He says that the fundamental issue between the Federal Vision crowd and their opponents is an understanding of creation. This is a thought I have had myself, but I will let Leithart say it better than I can. Here's an excerpt, but by all means, do read the whole piece.

Before God prohibited Adam from eating the tree of knowledge, the Eternal Word had already spoken Adam into existence. Before God's No He had already spoken a preexisting Yes, and the Yes set the context for the No. The sheer fact that there is something rather than nothing is testimony to God's prior Yes.

Every No from that time on is set within the context of God's Yes: God says Yes to Noah, and then commands him not to eat blood. God says Yes to Israel in bringing them out of Egypt, and then issues the Ten Words. Every command that God issues presupposes His preexisting Yes, because unless God was committed to preserving a people He would not warn them off the way of death.

For a certain brand of Reformed theology, such talk amounts to denying the gospel because it denies what is thought to be the sub-stratum on which the gratuity of the gospel depends.The Federal Vision controversy is, from this angle, more about creation than about soteriology or sacramental theology. Far be it from me to accuse those who oppose the Federal Vision of "denying creation," but they are, in my view, failing to work through a fully creationist theology. Dare I say, they have failed to think through a fully evangelical theology of creation.

Well said.

A funny thing happened on the way to the academy this morning...

Because I ride the bus to work everyday, I do a lot of observing. I peer out a frame created by the massive rectangular windows every morning to see my bustling little sector of Dallas on their way to work, walking their kids to school, stopping to fill up the gas tank.

Yesterday morning, I did a double take as my number 51 bus came near a Target store. There, in the the parking lot, I got a glimpse of an hunter orange-vested cop issuing a citation to a full-size Chevy pickup truck driver. As the image began to make the trek into my memory, I saw with my mind's eye that there was no police car any where near the scene. Luckily, we were at stop sign, and as I curiously pointed my eyes back to the parking lot, I saw something I'd never seen before: the cop was on a Segway. Whha-a! I couldn't help but emit a small chuckle as I mused upon the event: "How embarrassing! To have this truck with probably a V-6 like engine and to be ticketed by none other than a Segway cop!"

A Difference in Imagination

As I finished up the PCA's ad interim committee's report on the Federal Vision, etc., I could not help but think of how it seems to be missing a fundamental, philosophical assumption of FV. But then I thought, "No, philosophical assumption is not quite right. It's something perhaps more basic." Then I found this from Peter Leithart's blog. There is a fundamental difference in how each group sees the world: that is, there's a fundamental difference in imagination. That's what I was looking for: imagination. From Leihart's post:

One of the differences between those associated with "Federal Vision" theology and those opposed to it is a difference of theological imagination. The opponents operate with a theological imagination that distinguishes and clarifies; ontology is distinguished from relationality, nature from supernature, ecclesiology from soteriology.

Leithart goes on to describe what he calls the perichoretic imagination that one tends to find among the proponents of FV. Perichoresis was an ancient Christian way of attempting to describe the relationship of the three persons of the Trinity. Read more about perichoresis here and here.

John Calvin: Catholic with a little "c"?

I've been reading the PCA ad interim study group's findings on the Federal Vision (FV), New Perspective on Paul (NPP), and Auburn Avenue Theologies (AAT). I will have more to say about this document in future posts. In the meantime, I found this comment interesting by a Dominican professor who teaches at the University of Virginia.

Contrary to the false interpretations of Calvin on grace and the sacraments that are retailed by some of the Reformed, Calvin was, I would say, the one catholic writer among the Protestant reformers.

To me, this seems similar to what is being said among some of the Federal Vision folks. This comment was made by Fr. Augustine Thompson, O.P., at Francis Beckwith's blog:the Francis Beckwith who just recently resigned his post as President of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) because of his recently being received back in to the Roman Catholic Church.

Bruce Edwards on NT Wright's Assessment of Mere Christianity

Here is an interesting response to N.T. Wright's remarks about C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity by Bruce Edwards, a noted Lewisian scholar.

Before Joe Camel...

Before the days of Joe Camel, there was Fred Flintstone. Seriously. Watch this.

N.T. Wright on C.S. Lewis

I was reading a review of Lewis' Mere Christianity that NT Wright has written for Touchstone. This is the 60th anniversary of its publication. I ran across these words of Wright's. Well said.

I think it’s important that we are justified by faith: not by believing in justification by faith, but by believing in Jesus Christ. Obviously a clear understanding of justification would help a great deal, but I don’t myself regard that as the first thing to explain to a potential convert. Sufficient to draw them to Jesus.

The rest of the review is quite good. Wright offers some good criticisms and reaffirmations of Lewis in this classic work of the Oxford don.

In the days following the Virginia Tech massacre...

Peggy Noonan has some apt words for such a time as this. She wonders where all the common sense--perhaps we should read "backbone" here--has gone in our therapeutic culture. She implies that Cho Seung-Hui's behavior has been spoken of in such ambiguous--seemingly compassionate--terms that it lacks any sense of reality. Noonan's piece picks up on an irony present in our culture today: with all the talk of tolerance and compassion that's perpetually in the air, it's interesting that there is little in the way of real compassion present in our society. It takes real differences for there to be a place for actual compassion. Don't call someone a "mental defective," it may just exacerbate their psychosis (which, believe me, I understand--words and assumptions one develops about himself do affect his understanding of his self) or hurt their self-image. I heard this sentiment expressed just this week regarding Cho. But isn't it more damaging--and after Monday's events, I think everyone has to answer "yes"--to take such a narrow view--to think only of an individual's rights and self-image? I thought this part by Noonan was an insightful piece of writing:

With all the therapy in our great therapized nation, with all our devotion to emotions and feelings, one senses we are becoming a colder culture, and a colder country. We purport to be compassionate--we must respect Mr. Cho's privacy rights and personal autonomy--but of course it is cold not to have protected others from him. It is cold not to have protected him from himself.

That is, it's actually cold not to name things what they are and it's actually heartless not to interfere and intrude upon one's privacy--especially when the private world of that person does not match the real world "out there" of everyone else.

In the end, Noonan says that the most realistic and truest thing she has heard all week came from one of the shooting victims.

The most common-sensical thing I heard said came Thursday morning, in a hospital interview with a student who'd been shot and was recovering. Garrett Evans said of the man who'd shot him, "An evil spirit was going through that boy, I could feel it." It was one of the few things I heard the past few days that sounded completely true. Whatever else Cho was, he was also a walking infestation of evil. Too bad nobody stopped him. Too bad nobody moved.

Good Friday

I posted this quotation last year on Good Friday. It's worth doing it again.

God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing--or should we say "seeing"? there are no tenses in God--the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a "host" who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and "take advantage of" Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves. C.S. Lewis

On Lenten hiatus

For what it's worth. Here is a post I wrote last year at the beginning of Lent.

Cavemen

In the interest of bringing a little levity to this blog, I thought I might post a link to a favorite commercial of mine.

Walden Media to Produce Cinematic Version Of Screwtape

Apparently, Ralph Winter and Walden Media are into C.S.Lewis. Together, they’re producing a movie version of The Screwtape Letters that is expected to be out in 2008. Read more here.

Choral Treasure

If you are at all into church choral music, Gregorian chant, polyphony, etc., the new link to the right, Choral Treasure, is wonderful. It streams choral music 24/7. Give it a listen.

The Presentation of Our Lord

I forgot to post this yesterday...February 2nd is the day that Christians for centuries have remembered Christ's presentation at the temple i.e. The Presentation of Our Lord. At his presentation, sacrifices were made for Mary's purification and for Mary and Joseph's first born son. Thus, Christ, from the very beginning, has come to fulfill the Law. Also, at the presentation, a man waiting for the coming Messiah, Simeon, held the Christ child in his arms. The one through whom all things were made was held by one of his creations. Immanuel, God is with us!

I spoke about The Presentation in chapel on Thursday to my school's lower grades. Afterward, one first grade teacher jokingly reminded me that February 2nd is also Groundhog Day. We both had a lighthearted chuckle at this fact and went about our days. However, as I thought about it later, her observation did once again remind me of the importance of the church calendar. We have many other calendars--fiscal, academic and otherwise--competing for our attention, and most institutions recognize the easily overlooked fact that we live in time. Thus, they restructure their calendars--the time constraints within which they must function--based on what their corporate bodies are centered upon. Thus, financiers have their fiscal calendars, schools their academic ones, and so on.

The Church's calendar is restructured to be centered upon the Word made flesh--the One who is our access to the End of all things. By living with and by the church calendar throughout the year, we are acknowledging that the other calendars we must live by during our day-to-day lives are not the ultimate way we interpret time. Ultimately, our interpretation of time does not have at its center money, academics, etc. The Church's way of living in time--i.e. its calendar--has Christ at its center. The church calendar tells the story of Christ, sin, and redemption beginning every Advent season. As I am more and more convinced that it's the stories we live by that shape the way we reason about things and feel about our experiences, what better way to keep the story of "the way things are" in our imaginations and hearts than by living through it each year. We can have six more weeks of winter as long as the Messiah has come to us.

Read more about the Presentation of Our Lord.

The Making of a Commercial

I forgot to add this to my post from yesterday. Comes from JT's blog again...the making of that Sony commercial mentioned in yesterday's post is here. It's pretty amazing.

Do you know Jose Gonzalez?

I found this link at my friend JT's blog Exit 78 (BTW: Jt's blog is primarily a photo blog with some nice shots on it). This is a commercial for the Sony Bravia TV using Jose Gonzalez's cover of a song entitled "Heartbeats" (by a Swedish group called The Knife?). This is footage of Jose Gonzalez performing "Heartbeats" live. I haven't heard of this guy before, but I like this song. Very nice and melodic.

You can find Jose Gonzalez's MySpace Music page here.

The Police to Perform Surprise Gig at 2007 Grammys

Not much of a surprise anymore.

Read more here.

Sean Michel: The Next American Idol

About a week ago, I saw an advertisement on TV for the upcoming episode of American Idol. As the images were flashing by, I thought I caught a glimpse of a guy I knew from college named Sean Michel auditioning there in front of Simon, Paula, and Randy. And wouldn't you know, sho' nuff, it is he. I'm a big fan of his beard and he sang Johnny Cash's "God's Gonna Cut You Down." What more could you ask for? GO SEAN! You're going to Hollywood dawg!

Watch the audition here.

Here's another link.

Cruise 'is Christ' of Scientology

The Messiah?

The Right Not to Know

A few posts back, I quoted Alexander Solzhenitsyn at length on politics and the perils of having a society dominated by only the legal level of reality. I found this interesting article which highlights another part of the Soviet Russian exile's 1978 Harvard commencement address. The writer of the article, Darryl E. Owens, makes the claim that the media is doing a lot to encroach upon our right to privacy. Here's a sample:

Once, some things were private. But today unmentionables routinely are aired on The Today Show.
But the practice seems all the more disturbing in a case like Shawn's, yet another reminder of America's schizophrenic mind-set.
In a day when Big Brother eavesdrops on our chats, satellites can read our tattoos, and our most private moments can earn a very public airing on the World Wide Web, we vociferously bemoan our withering privacy.At the same time, an insatiable, vaguely prurient curiosity has yanked down the veil that once cloaked private life from the searing public eye and replaced it with a clear curtain.

The "Shawn" mentioned above is the Shawn Hornbeck--the now young man who was abducted four years ago in Missouri. Owens is critical of Oprah Winfrey's having Hornbeck and his parents on her show just days after his being rescued, asking the boy himself if he had been sexually abused. After Shawn opted not to talk about his experience, Oprah went to his parents--she "went there"--and asked if they believed Shawn had been abused.

As America hung on every word, the parents of the Missouri boy looked the Queen of All Media in the eye, slowly bobbled their heads, and answered, "Yes."Yes, indeed. After all, wasn't that the burning question that inquiring minds wanted to know? Isn't it what we deserved to know?

It's this right to know that bothers Owens, me, and Alexander Solzhentisyn. Don't we have the right not to know, and doesn't Shawn Hornbeck have the right not to relive a painful experience on national television. Here are Solzhenitsyns' thoughts:

Because instant and credible information has to be given [ in the media], it becomes necessary to resort to guesswork, rumors and suppositions to fill in the voids, and none of them will ever be rectified, they will stay on in the readers' memory. How many hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one's nation's defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.

One must wonder if Oprah and other journalists who are so quick to nab the story and get the scoop think of what they're doing in these cases as "gossip, nonsense, [and/or] vain talk." I think Oprah probably has good intentions, but you know what they say about those.

Human Body Adventure

In China they have this exhibit for kids called Human Body Adventure. Each piece in the exhibit reveals the functions of the body. I think this is what I think it is....Don't do it kids! It's a trick!

Scientists reconstruct Dante's face

Read about Dante's makeover here.

Solzhenitsyn and Politics

As I implied in a post months back, one of the reasons I tend to steer clear of politics is best summed up by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his 1978 Harvard commencement address. There, he warns against understanding reality in a purely legal way. That is, the legal level of reality becomes the predominant one, thus pushing the religious and spiritual levels to the fringes. And, as long as you are right according to "the letter of the law," no other considerations need to be examined. Here are his words:

People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law, even though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert. Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk: it would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames. An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it.

I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses.

Throughout the rest of the speech, Solzhenitsyn continues to call for "voluntary self-restraint" as the way to save society from the mediocrity he mentions above. In a society governed by the rule of law, there must be sacrifice and temperance. Societies governed by an "objective legal scale" are indeed great, but do we dare to continue to promote such societies if all moral or religious law is forced out of the public sphere? Out of all discussions regarding public life?

Irony, or Politics as Usual

The political world, for the most part, is not a realm that I often find myself that enthused about. However, I couldn't help but see the irony in this story from the Washington Post. The article's about Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats taking over our legislative branch. By the way, is she doing the Arsenio Hall up there?

Here's an excerpt:

Despite the promised "new direction for America," getting the money out of politics and all of that, some facts of Washington life appear immutable and eternal.

"One hundred hours to make this the most honest and open Congress in history," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared at the beginning of a history-making day -- which ended last night with the Democrat from California presiding over a glitzy fundraiser open to anyone with $1,000 for a ticket.