Category: Vital Signs

By some measures, the influence of feminist theology peaked in the 1990’s.  It is still around, however, acting as a supporting pillar for liberal religion’s latest preoccupation: the elimination of “gender.” Feminist theologians and clergy convened in March 2004 for an annual “Women and the Word” conference at Boston University’s School of Theology, challenging masculine...

Concerned about declining confidence in his administration’s policy in Iraq—and, equally important, falling support for his reelection campaign—President George W. Bush gave the first of several planned speeches on Iraq to an audience at the Army War College.  Alas, he offered the usual platitudes about providing Iraq “a free, representative government” and occupying that country...

“When violence breaks out, Mel Gibson will have a much higher authority than professors and bishops to answer to.”  So predicted Boston University’s Paula Fredriksen in one of the opening salvos in the year-long campaign to kill Mel Gibson’s film masterpiece, The Passion of the Christ—a campaign that was, in equal measure, hysterical, disingenuous, ignorant,...

To justify war for the establishment of democracy in the Arab world, neoconservatives have referred specifically to Germany as the test case to prove that democratization by war and occupation can be successful.  Apart from the fact that there may be some relevant cultural and historical differences between the Arab/Muslim world and Germany, there are...

President Bush’s recent announcement that he will renominate Alan Greenspan for a fifth term as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board elicited mostly favorable reactions from a wide range of economic and political pundits. At the critical end of the spectrum, economist James Galbraith, in an op-ed entitled “Greenspan, The man who stayed too long,”...

In the autumn of 1909, a troupe of Sicilian actors, led by Giovanni di Grasso, arrived in St. Petersburg to satisfy a refined craving of the Russian intelligentsia, then widely shared in fashionable circles throughout Europe, for the experience of the primitive.  Still, only a hundred or so spectators turned up to savor art at...

While “off Broadway” is often the destination for the worst sort of stage-direction anarcho-anachronism, with Othello in spaceships and all-lesbian versions of Macbeth, it may surprise the non-New Yorker to learn that it is often the place to discover classic drama played absolutely straight (in all senses) and flawlessly acted. Such was the case recently...

National headlines greeted the recent acquittal of a lesbian United Methodist minister by a church court in Washington state.  Is America’s third-largest religious denomination going the way of the “gay”-friendly Episcopal Church, secular reporters wondered? The answer is: probably not.  The trial of the Rev. Karen Dammann was more a reflection of liberal and demographically...

One cannot reasonably assume that the attacks of September 11, 2001, were a seamless conspiracy.  Even a successful plot is not a well-oiled machine, and, whatever the plotting behind the scenes, as Shakespeareans say about Romeo and Juliet, the skyjackings of September 11 were, in some ways, tragedy snatched from the jaws of comedy. Take,...

Two years ago, I was invited to address a group of Jewish-American women on the question, “Is the American media coverage of Middle East biased?”  The event took place during the height of the second Palestinian intifada, and my hosts were accusing the New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as some of...

Back when I was in college, a sociology professor assigned our class Michael Parenti’s Inventing Reality for reading and review.  In this book, subtitled The Politics of News Media, Parenti, an unabashed Marxist, comes across as a pale imitation of media watchdog Ben Bagdikian.  Anyone who owns a media outlet or holds a position of...

Communist poet Bertolt Brecht, after the 1953 risings in East Germany, suggested that the Communist government should just dissolve the people and elect a new one.  That is essentially what is happening in the United States.  The American government is dissolving the people and electing a new one—in the name of shoring up and “growing”...

Most people believe the history of race relations in the United States is neatly divided by geography.  Those states north of the Mason-Dixon Line were paragons of equality and liberty, where race was not an issue and diversity flourished in all its glory.  In the benighted states to their south, however, the entire social structure...

During the late 19th century, when the star of American industrial power was on the rise, protectionist Pennsylvania Congressman William Kelley declared, “A people who cannot supply their own demand for iron and steel, but purchase it from foreigners beyond seas, are not independent . . . they are politically dependent.”  The 21st century has...

At the end of the Episcopal Church, U.S.A.’s General Convention last summer, an academic friend, not an Episcopalian, asked me, “What argument is advanced against blessing polyamorous unions by those Episcopalians who favor the blessing of same-sex sexual unions?  Or do they pull the trigger and say that the blessing of same-sex unions is only...

More than ever before, homosexual characters and situations are being featured on television.  Needless to say, the lay of TV Land is overwhelmingly favorable: cheery, cuddly, cute, and camp. The first of such programming originated in the formerly Great Britain, either imported directly (East Enders, Absolutely Fabulous) or adapted to the American small screen (All...

As if the Bush administration were not busy enough already, Undersecretary of State John Bolton has said that North Korea should “draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq.”  That followed a comment from President George W. Bush that, if Washington’s efforts “don’t work diplomatically, they’ll have to work militarily.” Hopes for the former have risen and...

Beginning in 1991, for more than a year, a 22-year-old Salvadoran immigrant sexually abused an eight-year-old California girl.  This permanent legal resident took advantage of her whenever he was at his cousin’s house, where he lived in Los Angeles. He was not always there, so the child would return to the home of her girlfriend...

If the recent passage of the $395-billion Medicare prescription-drug bill teaches us anything, it is that just electing more Republicans to the House and Senate accomplishes very little.  We have a Republican House, a Republican Senate, and a Republican President.  Yet over 200 House Republicans voted for the biggest expansion of the Great Society welfare...

Imagine, if you can, thousands of parents last January insisting that the Fairfax County, Virginia, school board distribute a 169-question sex survey to their 13-, 15-, and 17-year-olds.  Envision legions of taxpayers falling all over themselves to divert $60,000 earmarked for educational purposes to ask students about oral sex, number of sexual partners, depression, and...

In 1917, two revolutions engulfed war-ravaged Europe.  The first was America’s military intervention in France on June 26, which prolonged World War I and, thus, made possible the second: the communist seizure of power in Russia on November 7. To win maximum public support for their respective revolutions, the two rivals, Woodrow Wilson and Vladimir...

On February 13, 2001, George W. Bush, three weeks in the Oval Office, issued his first official White House document pertaining to national security.  The document, called a National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD), partly reorganized the National Security Council, which had been established by President Truman in 1947 and put into the Executive Branch in...

Murray N. Rothbard must have seen the post-September 11 era in a dream to be able to sum it up as well as he did in his 1992 inaugural address to the John Randolph Club: Social democracy is still here in all its variants, defining our entire respectable political spectrum, from advanced victimology and feminism...

Willow Creek Community Church belongs in the suburbs, its massive campus sprawling across a stretch of drained swampland in greater Chicago.  The members of Willow Creek are, by and large, suburbanites, and the “programming” behind the “services” at Willow is custom-made for them.  The attendants wear polo shirts; the messages are relevant; and all of...

Iraq is conquered; unfortunately, winning the peace is proving far more difficult.  Bringing down an unpopular, isolated dictatorship in a wreck of a country is one thing.  Creating a liberal, multiparty, multiethnic democracy where one has never existed is quite another. Officially, the Pentagon proclaims that we will stay “as long as necessary” and leave...

Remember communitarianism?  It was one of those embarrassing fads of the 1990’s, like Furbies, Beanie Babies, and the “Third Way,” a socio-moral movement that was meant to signify all things warm and cuddly.  As articulated in his 1993 book, The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities and the Communitarian Agenda (1993), and in two sequels, communitarian...

Tacitus, writing about Caesar Augustus and the beginnings of the Roman Empire, says, “How few were left who had seen the republic!” How few are left.  Tacitus also mourns that the “State had been revolutionized, and there was not a vestige left of the old morality.”  John Dickinson, who, like many of the founders of...

For years, conservatives have wondered if there was any movie Hollywood would balk at showing.  Blasphemy, incessant profanity, graphic sex, obscene violence—none of these has proved an obstacle to Hollywood, and numerous films containing some or all of these elements have enjoyed widespread critical acclaim. We have finally found out what sort of movie will...

As a race, the British are considered neither the most intellectual nor the most artistic, Britain’s role in the invention of modern physics (Newton) and modern painting (Turner) notwithstanding.  Yet their ability to make cultural icons of near-universal appeal is second to none.  Quite apart from the philosophical contributions of Locke and Burke and Hume...

“Poetry is a northern man’s dream of the South.”  —F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Last of the Belles” In the summer of 1933, Southern Agrarian poet Allen Tate and his friend Marxist literary critic Malcolm Cowley visited various Civil War landmarks in northern Tennessee and southern Kentucky.  After being photographed shaking hands in front of the...

There are few issues more emotional than abortion.  The dogmatism of the respective combatants strikes fear in the hearts of lesser mortals—which means almost every politician.  Three decades after Roe v. Wade, the issue of abortion is unlikely ever to be resolved politically. The major parties have largely followed the passions of their most active...

During his term as president, Jimmy Carter, then a Southern Baptist, called for a White House Conference on Families in order to redefine family as any group of humans living together—so general a definition that college roommates or even a military platoon could be considered a family.  Even the French Foreign Legion, whose motto is...

The U.S. Supreme Court’s June 23 decision striking down the University of Michigan’s race-based undergraduate admissions policy ended a decade-long struggle started by university administrators and finished by conservative legislators and their grassroots supporters. On April 23, 1997, Michigan State Rep. David Jaye, a paleoconservative Republican from suburban Macomb County, sponsored an amendment to the...

Presbyterians have a particular reputation. We are a rather staid bunch, more comfortable in the environs of the country club than those of the chicken farm, more atuned to the hoity-toity, less to hoi polloi. We’re called the frozen chosen, more for accuracy’s sake than for endearment. We read old and dusty books about doctrines...

For the first time in memory, teachers refused to be intimidated by the National Education Association’s leftist leadership.  At their annual convention in New Orleans on June 30, a large contingent of teacher-delegates insisted the NEA drop “reproductive freedom”/family planning from its voluminous list of resolutions and stick to topics actually relevant to schools and...

I am trying to lose a few extra pounds and have been reasonably good as of late.  The other day, however, some Brach’s chocolate eggs began calling out to me: “Eat me, eat me.”  I was powerless to resist, so strong is my addiction.  In just an hour, I had devoured a pound of them.  I’ve...

Does God take sides in conflicts between men?  If He does, how can we tell?  Is the side favored by God always victorious, or can a lost cause also have been blessed? Bob Dylan mocked the very notion of God taking sides in human warfare: Accept it with pride, For you don’t count the dead...

Imagine Time had not named FBI whistleblower Colleen Rowley a “person of the year” but gave the award to the FBI bureaucrats who obstructed Crowley’s investigation of Arab terrorists.  That would be no more ridiculous than Washingtonian’s naming of Charles Moose as one of its “Washingtonians of the year.”  Moose is the Montgomery County police...

On the first page of The Death of the West, Patrick Buchanan proclaims that “America has undergone a cultural and social revolution.” He argues that opinions, beliefs, and values have, in the last generation, been altered by elites using TV, the arts, educational institutions, and various avenues of entertainment to transmit their ideas. One of...

As American troops seized the center of Baghdad on April 9, looting, guerrilla warfare, and chaos continued across Iraq.  In 21 days, U.S. forces had driven to the capital of Saddam’s Iraq, though arguably Washington had been making war on this long-suffering country for over a decade—a war of economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation, propaganda, occupation...

In his critical work about the bicentenaire of the French Revolution, Le Grand Déclassement, French historian Pierre Chaunu explores the first stages of the unraveling of the glorification of France as a revolutionary nation conceived in 1789.  By the time Chaunu’s book was published in 1989, however, the official celebrations had been both scaled back...

William Jefferson Clinton is the first Democratic president of the postwar era to have presided over a decline in manufacturing jobs in the American Southeast.  According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, monthly manufacturing payroll employment increased ten percent in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and...

Pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton is breath-ing new life into the popular perception of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) as a “disease”—a chemical imbalance that requires a stabilizing, “counter-balancing” agent such as Ritalin, Adderall, Concerta, or another name-brand amphetamine to correct a defective brain.  An example can be found in his recent syndicated column: “Managing ADHD Once...

In February, a remarkable article appeared in the New York Times Magazine.  It was an account by Harriet McBryde Johnson of her debate with Princeton philosophy professor Peter Singer, whom Johnson noted is “often called—and not just by his book publicist—the most influential philosopher of our time.”  The subject of the debate was whether parents...

In 1865, six years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species, Francis Galton wrote: If talented men were mated with talented women, of the same mental and physical characters as themselves . . . we might produce a highly bred human race . . . If we divided the rising generation...

In the final days and hours preceding the current Persian Gulf war, reports extolling the dazzling information-age capabilities that American troops would take into battle against Saddam Hussein became a media staple.  Newspapers, newsweeklies, and television vied with one another in enthusing about the latest in satellite-guided bombs, unmanned aircraft, and state-of-the-art digital gadgetry.  The...

All prudent consumers are supposed to be guided by the warning embodied in the ancient Latin expression Caveat emptor (“Let the buyer beware”).  A contemporary geopolitical modification of that expression should be borne in mind by Americans as the United States more vigorously embraces the legitimacy of preemptive military attacks against adversaries who may attack...

The tax cuts proposed by President George W. Bush take significant steps toward the reform of a federal tax code that retards growth of the capital stock, productivity, and incomes of all Americans.  His plan to eliminate the death tax, increase expensing of investment for small businesses, end double taxation of dividend income, expand “returns...

If there ever was a case to be made against the therapeutic approach to childrearing—packaged as “parenting” by three decades of child psychologists—the pathetic image of four aging, 1970’s-era radicals, who gave themselves the silly name “Symbionese Liberation Army,” was it.  I cannot help but wonder how differently the lives of Michael Bortin, William Harris,...

The art and music of Western civilization have gone through a transformation that mirrors the modern transformation of community.  Instead of the rich and varied tapestry of art forms and people—the products of subsidiarity—we suffer from a monotonous regularity.  Not to worry, say the foppish multiculturalists; this lack of variance is actually “diversity.”  Diversity, as...