Remember when?
Remember back to when the fatwa on Salman Rushdie seemed a strange and unfathomable aberration? Never such innocence again.
Continue reading →Category Archives: Religion
Violence against Americans in Cairo and Benghazi
Let me see if I’ve got this straight: A privately produced and amateurish anti-Islam film made by expat Coptic Christians in the US and distributed on YouTube is said to spark violent protests in Cairo. The US Embassy there apologies … Continue reading →
Second best
What are the odds of this? From Mia Farrow’s autobiography, What Falls Away: My mother [actress Maureen O’Sullivan], her father’s favorite, went to the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton. She hated it. They had to wear vests in … Continue reading →
Getting to know Romney the do-gooder
Of all the things I saw at the convention, the most potentially powerful was the series of presentations about Romney’s good deeds. It was both curious and moving, and unprecedented (at least in my memory) for an introduction to a … Continue reading →
I’m not at all sure…
…whether this article, which I found at Drudge, is reporting the truth. If it is, however, that would be a very ominous sign in Egypt. On the other hand, ye olde blood libel is alive and well and living in … Continue reading →
The WASP-less election
I hadn’t thought of this before, but it’s an interesting point that Peter Shrag makes: For the first time in the 236-year history of the Republic, no one on either presidential ticket belongs to the once-prototypical American group, the White … Continue reading →
Romney: the authentically nice politician?
“Authentically nice politician”—is that a double oxymoron? Not according to Sven Wilson, whose article on the subject was brought to my attention by a reader. I’m in nearly complete agreement with what he says here: Romney has, as we all … Continue reading →
Religious exemptions: from Obamacare and more
There’s been an email going around alleging that Muslims will be exempt from the Obamacare tax/mandate. It’s not true, at least at the moment, but it stands a remote possibility of becoming true. The facts are here and here, and … Continue reading →
White/Jewish
In the ever-expanding interests of diversity in academia and elsewhere, we’ve hit a new high (that is, low): Touting a move to make its faculty more diverse, CUNY administrators have broken out Jews into a separate minority group: “White/Jewish.” CUNY … Continue reading →
Romney’s quiet first
When Obama was nominated and elected, one of the big deals was that he was the first African-American in that position. And that really was a big deal, given our racial history, and despite the fact that his black ancestry … Continue reading →
Religiosity and age
Here’s a study that purports to indicate that people get more religious over time: Belief in God is highest among older people and increases with age, perhaps due to the growing realization that death is coming closer, University of Chicago … Continue reading →
The good life, the long life
In yesterday’s thread about eating beef, commenter “SteveH” asks: Where does this obsession with quanity of life come from? I could understand it if we lost years on the average lifespan over the past 100 years. But we’ve gained tremendously. … Continue reading →