Month: June 2011

Critical Issues

The tragedy is that they’re dead

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Quote of the Day for June 27th, 2011: The New York Times’ Ross Douthat’s take on the Mara Hvistendahl book I posted on last Wednesday: This places many Western liberals, Hvistendahl included, in a distinctly uncomfortable position. Their own premises insist that the unborn aren’t human beings yet, and that the right to an abortion is nearly absolute. A self-proclaimed agnostic about when life begins, Hvistendahl insists that she hasn’t written “a book about death and killing.” But this leaves her struggling to define a victim for the crime th...

Critical Issues

‘I want to abort because if this baby is born it will be a Gemini, but I want a Libra.’

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Quote of the Day for Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011: Jonathan Last, in a review published at the Wall Street Journal Online of Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, a recent book by feminist Mara Hvistendahl: Ms. Hvistendahl is particularly worried that the "right wing" or the "Christian right"—as she labels those whose politics differ from her own—will use sex-selective abortion as part of a wider war on abortion itself. She believes that something must be done about the purposeful abo...

Politics & Economics

They were not like the penniless rabble of antiquity who traded their votes to unscrupulous demagogues

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Quote of the Day for Tuesday, June 7th, 2011: Walter Russell Mead on The Death of the American Dream: A nation of family farms is a nation of family firms; suburban America was a land of employees.  America’s shift from a nation of entrepreneurs to a nation working for corporations and government was a profound change in national life that even today is not well or fully understood. The ideal of the independent small farmer was at the heart of early American democratic ideology.  Critics of democracy had always asserted in the past that a mass ...

Church

You need to know what you believe

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Quote of the Day for Monday, June 6th, 2011: Pope Benedict XVI, from the forward to Youcat, the new Youth Catechism of the Catholic Church published last year, and released recently in English by Ignatius Press: You need to know what you believe… Yes, you need to be more deeply rooted in the faith than the generation of your parents so that you can engage the challenges and temptations of this time with strength and determination. You need God’s help if your faith is not going to dry up like a dewdrop in the sun, if you want to resist the blandishm...

Culture & Philosophy

College as a way to babysit 18-year-olds is not very efficient for anyone involved

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Quote of the Day for Sunday, June 5th, 2011: Naomi Schaefer Riley, writing in the June 3rd Washington Post, on the value of a modern college education, and the disconnect exposed by PayPal’s Peter Thiel when he recently thumbed his nose at the university system: Executives at U.S. companies routinely complain about the lack of reading, writing and math skills in the recent graduates they hire. Maybe they too will get tired of using higher education as a credentialing system. Maybe it will be easier to recruit if they don’t have to be concerned about the ...

Scripture

The Open English Bible: Trendiness, Updated

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Along with the previously mentioned CEB, I spent some time last weekend checking out a couple other new Bible translations, one of which was the Open English Bible (New Testament), published electronically in 2011 – I viewed a PDF rendition dated April 4th, 2011. Primarily an individual effort by Russell Allen, this work is an “open source” revision of the rather obscure 1904 Twentieth Century New Testament. Considered the first “modern English” translation, the TCNT was produced in Britain by a group of mostly laymen seeking to produce an &#...