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It’s wordy, and not nearly as reflective as the author thinks, but there’s some interesting material there: Across the Great Divide, a piece from Columbia Journalism Review on journalists and religion. The basic point seems to be that journalists are unable to deal with religion intelligently because they are looking for observable events … More ...

The exhilarating marketplace of ideas and free thought, Anno Domini 2004:

• Renowned sociologist Alan Wolfe included a stupidly tendentious and disingenuous attack on Paul Gottfried in a stupidly tendentious and disingenuous piece about Carl Schmitt and conservatives in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the mag denied Gottfried even a brief reply. (The point

I have yet another draft of my “theory of everything” paper online. As always, comments are very welcome.

One line of thought behind the piece is that the modern world is based on a theory of knowledge that tries to be very rigorous but ends up not working. Think of

• Descartes and his method of

Some conservatives out in California have a good project, keeping after the LA Times and other media outlets about left-wing spin and distortion: Oh, That Liberal Media. Current themes include what looks like a campaign of defamation against Justice Scalia. The posters are neoconish, which I suppose makes sense for people whose world is … More ...

It turns out that upwardly-mobile Republican Catholic Justice Kennedy was going to vote to overturn Roe v. Wade in 1992, but ended up casting the decisive pro-Roe vote. It seems that Blackmun, O’Connor and Souter brought him around by working him over in private.

Because of the switch, the Casey decision ended up … More ...

Landmarks on the road to a glorious future:

• Free to be you and me: in England a man who served seven years for attempted murder after he laced his wife’s gin and tonic with deadly nightshade, and then tried to cover his tracks by spiking drinks in a Safeway supermarket, has been hired as an

Recent reminders that things that aren’t well founded don’t last no matter how settled they seem:

• It’s easy to forget how extraordinarily out of favor non-socialist ideas were when Hayek published The Road to Serfdom in 1944. Only 2,000 copies were published in England, and he had real trouble getting it published at all in

Liberalism never sleeps. Even as I write, its intellectual and operational functionaries are beavering away all over the world working out the implications of what now counts as the One True Belief:

• In Australia they’re taking the next step beyond gun control: banning swords. Lead pipes will presumably be next. The fact that gun

Roger Scruton has a really excellent article on Islam and politics (*.pdf format). A notable aspect of the piece is the light it sheds on the strength of Islam in relation to modernity. Scruton’s account confirms that radical Islam isn’t medieval at all. It reflects, for example, in the form of Wahhabism, the Protestant Reformation … More ...

We’ve talked a bit recently about implications of the New Urbanism, and a few years ago I wrote a book review touching on connections between tradition and fashionable scientific theories having to do with “complexity” and “emergence.” Now there’s a book that works organizational science and complex systems theory into the pattern: Confederates in … More ...