Monthly Archives: November 2009

Huckabee and the Tacoma police massacre

A specious leftist belief that the criminal justice system is racist has undoubtedly led to more disastrous criminal justice decisions than a specious religious belief that one is in touch with one’s favored divinity.  And perhaps Mike Huckabee’s high rate … Continue reading

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The Church of Climate Change? (3)

Here’s a fairly even-handed summary of the Warmergate scandal from the London Times. These sections are particularly relevant to the idea that a belief in AGW has mutated, for some, into a quasi-religious faith: …There is unease even among researchers … Continue reading

Posted in politics, science, Science & Faith | 17 Comments

Life of Brian – Thirty Years On

There’s a nice article by Sanjeev Bhaskar in today’s Sunday Telegraph on the Life of Brian, perhaps the greatest of British film comedies and thirty years old this year (FWIW I wrote about the film on its twenty-fifth anniversary here). … Continue reading

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A nation without divine favor

Reading Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism I am struck again by the peculiarity of the American nation, and its fundamental radicalism. I have already stated that this is implicitly an Anglo-Protestant nation. As a point of fact Protestant churches … Continue reading

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Immaculate Conception: The Inner-city Version

Seven and a half months into Ta-Shai Pendleton’s first pregnancy, her child was stillborn. Then in early 2008, she bore a daughter prematurely.  Soon after, Ms. Pendleton moved from a community in Racine that was thick with poverty to a … Continue reading

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The limits of pluralism, and the necessity of an identity

I just finished Vali Nasr’s Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World. Very much in the mold of Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home … Continue reading

Posted in culture, history | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

The Church of Climate Change? (2)

Via the New York Times come these comments from a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia (the hacked documents came from the UEA’s Climatic Research Unit). They are particularly interesting for what he has to say about the … Continue reading

Posted in politics, science, Science & Faith | Tagged | 3 Comments

The Church of Climate Change?

Heather, in the course of your (fine) post on Syncopation and Thanksgiving, you reject the notion “that global warming theory represents some atavistic religious impulse.” In one sense, of course, you are quite right to do so. The idea that we … Continue reading

Posted in politics, science, Science & Faith | Tagged , | 10 Comments

Syncopation and Thanksgiving

The New England colonists balanced Thanksgiving feasts with petitionary fasting, known as days of “public humiliation and prayer:” Pleas for rain during spells of drought were the most common reason for fasting. But Puritans also fasted whenever a comet, an … Continue reading

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Politics and Science

Barely was the ink dry (pixels glowing, whatever) on  my having posted this to National Review Online: Politics … corrupts the human sciences, suppressing research in areas where it’s feared results will crash up against what Bill Buckley called “the prevailing structure of … Continue reading

Posted in politics, science | 6 Comments