- Phase-outs in the interregnum.
- Ray Ewry, Second Greatest Olympian Ever.
- New Agey hokum at the LCWR confab.
- Mike Lofgren’s Ack-Bassward GOP diagnosis.
- Legal conundrum.
- Infinitely Indigestible?
- A Poetic plea from one time has passed by.
The more I visit Libertarian candidates’ Facebook pages and websites, the more I think they’re living in a radically individualist dream world, perversely pushing a kind of utopian ideology, which sensible people could easily see as dystopian.
If we could get to the Libertarian promised land, I suppose it would leave room for me and like-minded to coalesce into supportive civil society groups. But I have no idea how they actually propose to get us from here to there (“phase out” is a little vague; and what do we do about various “not a federal issue” issues during the interregnum?).
Muddling along with the old “eternal vigilance” thing looks fairly good today.
As the Olympics wind down, I want to pay belated homage to my hometown’s Olympic legend, Ray Ewry.
I was vaguely aware that Lafayette Urban Ministries had recently named a youth program after him, but I’ve had a lot on my plate and paid insufficient attention to Ewry’s amazing story. His 8 Gold Medals is second only to Michael Phelps. His World Record in the standing long jump stood until the event was consigned to oblivion.
Not bad for a kid who had polio and was at risk of permanent paralysis.
The way you really get going to create in the world is you want more of the joining of genius. It feels good. Nature put pleasure as it did with sexuality. She put pleasure into supra-sexuality. It goes on to say that this would lead to a more co-creative society. I think the post-menopausal women over 50 are entering regeno-pause. Most people who find a life’s purpose and stay alive will start to feel regenerated. Like me—I am totally amazed to be 79 years old and feeling this way. I don’t know what word you use for men—it’s not regeno-pause—but it’s the evolutionary man and the evolutionary woman who get turned on. Then our creativity joining with each other creates a world. The old system can’t do it.
Barbara Marx Hubbard, a New Ager who doesn’t even pretend to be Christian, saying the sorts of things that the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (think “Nuns on a Bus”) apparently thought would make her a splendid keynote speaker at their just-concluded conference.
Of course, the Vatican and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops only has issues with LCWR because they serve the poor. It has nothing to do with doctrinal problems. Nope. Not a bit. And the LCWR would never think of spreading that story to provide protective cover. (H/T Rod Dreher)
Mike Lofgren is entitled to his opinions (with many of which I agree), but he’s not entitled to his own facts.
Daniel Larison pulls a quote and effectively demolishes it. Rick Warren never grilled McCain and Obama (two of the least convincingly religious candidates ever to run for President) on Christology. It’s doubtful that Warren cares about Christology and his typical follower probably doesn’t know what it is.
There’s something more going on here than a Theocratic nutcases taking over the Grand Old Party, and Lofgren, who accuses others of being impervious to facts, exhibits his own brand of cluelessness in his little story.
Larison:
It’s debatable whether religion and politics are more intertwined today than they were forty or fifty years ago, but if they are most religiously observant Americans seem to be putting their largely secular political goals first. This is the opposite of what Lofgren thinks has been happening.
I had some speculation about Lofgren’s motives here, but decided to delete it.
Some lawsuits are really weird without necessarily lacking merit.
If a state decides to ratchet up the level of religious freedom protected in its constitution, surpassing the protection of federal law, is it unconstitutional to exclude prisoners from the higher level of protection, relegating prisoners to whatever federal law protects?
It appears that we shall soon (in the sense that “soon” works in the law) know the answer, via Qandah v. Lombardi, (WD MO, filed 8/8/2012). Since Roemer v. Evans, I don’t bet against federal constitutional challenges to state constitutional amendments. I expect (I haven’t peeked at the pleadings) that Roemer will be heavily deployed by the Plaintiffs, although prisoners lack the cachet of GLBTetcetera. (H/T Religion Clause blog)
I commented the other day on a claim that Edgar Allen Poe is revered as a great poet in France partly because of Baudelaire’s translations. Some of the writers at The American Conservative are talking about books they found very hard to read (here and here), while Samuel Goldman asks how much translation may have to do with some such difficulties.
I am not the voracious reader any of these other guys are, but I agree that Infinite Jest was infinitely indigestible, and despite assurances that it was sheer genius, I could not finish David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite.
I stand corrected on anti-Catholicism being the last acceptable bigotry. It has company. (Writer’s Almanac)
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 