Dubious Honor: Austin “ranks sixth for heavy drinkers, eighth for binge drinkers, and tenth for overall drinking.”
“10 Annoying Habits of a Geeky Spouse.” I’m sometimes guilty of 1, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9. (Of course, specifying what parts of a blog list you’re guilty of is the 11th annoying habit of a geeky spouse.)
Britney Spears under orders to read the Bible every day.
“ [C]ollecting Facebook friends is the equivalent of being a cat lady, collecting numerous Himalayans, which you have neither the time nor the inclination to feed” (Matt Labash in “Down with Facebook!” in the Weekly Standard).
Michael Spencer says an anti-Christian chapter in Western history is about to begin and out of the ruins a new vitality and integrity will rise. Mark Galli at CT says, well, yes and no. He expects cultural evangelicalism to fade (though not in 10 years), but never evangelicalism itself.
Cool arrangements of some old songs: Page CXVI (HT: Between Two Worlds)
“Ever since the Internet made itself indispensable, experts have observed its unmatched potential for facilitating good and evil. When we desperately need teachers who relate biblical truth to current thoughts and trends, the Internet provides them with an effective and efficient forum. Yet the Internet also demolishes safeguards that formerly suppressed our sin nature….Since we can't ignore the Internet's opportunities, we must learn to minimize its vices. That starts with asking whether our Internet personalities reveal more about ourselves than we'd like to admit” (from Collin Hansen’s “Blogs: A Window to Our Souls” in CT)
“Until my encounter with conservatism I had only known the racial determinism of segregation on the one hand and of white liberalism on the other -- two varieties of white supremacy in which I could only be dependent and inferior. The appeal of conservatism is the mutuality it asserts between individual and political freedom, its beautiful idea of a free man in a free society. And it offers minorities the one thing they can never get from liberalism: human rather than racial dignity.” (Shelby Steele)
“Since Obama began running for president, researchers have made some rather amazing strides in alternative stem cell research. Science and ethics finally fell in love, in other words, and Obama seems to have fallen asleep during the kiss. Either that, or he decided that keeping an old political promise was more important than acknowledging new developments. In the process, he missed an opportunity to prove that he is pro-science but also sensitive to the concerns of taxpayers who don't want to pay for research that requires embryo destruction.” (Everyone should read Kathleen Parker’s commentary on stem cell research. I wrote about Obama’s decision to fund this research here.)
“Earlier this week, when President Obama lifted the ban on federal funding of stem-cell research using destroyed human embryos, I said the moral dilemmas in this field would become increasingly difficult. Buckle up. We're on our way.” (That’s how William Saletan, an author hardly mistaken for a right-winger, opens a chilling article in Slate, an e-zine hardly mistaken for a right-wing publication. The article is called “Drill Babies, Drill,” about an Oxford professor who seriously recommends that we begin harvesting organs of aborted fetuses. Yikes. But when we’re letting “science” and not “ideology” drive our ethics, as President Obama declared in his plans to fund embryonic-destructive stem cell research, what’s stopping us from moving from harvesting fetuses after harvesting embryos?)
To those who would say that there are there are myriad pro-life issues, including the environment and health care, David Brooks writes, “It is true that nearly every political issue concerns the preservation of human life. But not every issue concerns the definition of the human community -- whom we count as one among us, and whom we cast beyond our protection” (article).
I Am Part of A Lost Generation (HT: Joe Carter’s Commonplace):
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