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Tuesday, January 10, 2017

Either Argument Or Violence

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Nathan Beacom at The Federalist makes the case that our polity faces two alternatives: Either we can resolve our political disputes through...
Sunday, January 8, 2017

Bigger Threat Than ISIL

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Dexter Filkins has written a captivating piece for The New Yorker on what many consider to be the biggest threat facing Iraq at the moment, ...
Saturday, January 7, 2017

Boom Star

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If astronomers at Calvin College in Michigan are correct in five years we should be able to see the aftermath of an event that occurred almo...
Friday, January 6, 2017

Unable to Call it Evil

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By now the news of the kidnapping and torture of a mentally-challenged white man by four blacks has been widely disseminated, and most peopl...
Thursday, January 5, 2017

Critical Thinking (Pt. II)

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Yesterday we began to look at a column by Mary Tillotson who discusses eight things people can do to become better thinkers. I'd like t...
Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Critical Thinking (Pt. I)

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Mary Tillotson at The Federalist presents a good lesson in critical thinking. Her immediate context is the application of a critical eye to...
Monday, January 2, 2017

Meaning and Beauty

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Michael Baruzzini writing at First Things recalls the an exchange between Richard Dawkins and Archbishop Rowan Williams in which Dawkins ...
Saturday, December 31, 2016

Looking for Ethics in All the Wrong Places

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A friend some time ago passed along a link to Susan Jacoby's discussion in the New York Times of a book by Phil Zuckerman titled Living...
Friday, December 30, 2016

The President's Options

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President Obama has promised that he will respond to Russian hacking undertaken during the U.S. presidential campaign. An article at Bloombe...
Thursday, December 29, 2016

Favorite Reads in 2016

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I had time to read (and listen to on Libre Vox) a lot of books this year, about eighty in all. Here by category are my favorite thirty five ...
Wednesday, December 28, 2016

Back-Stabber

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Alan Dershowitz is a very liberal law professor at Harvard, but despite his sympathy for many of President Obama's domestic policies he...
Tuesday, December 27, 2016

A Fortunate Universe

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I recently finished reading a book by cosmologists Geraint Lewis and Luke Barnes titled A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely-Tuned Univers...
Monday, December 26, 2016

Hateful Speech

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Much of what is called "hate speech" in our contemporary political climate is not "hate" speech at all but is in fact si...
Saturday, December 24, 2016

On Christmas Eve

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Christmas is a magical time, but it's not the trappings of the secular world that make it magical - except maybe for very young children...
Friday, December 23, 2016

Why Christians Celebrate Christmas

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In this season of shopping and feasting it's easy to lose sight of why Christmas is a special day. The following allegory, which we'...
Thursday, December 22, 2016

St. Nick

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This is a post I've put up on VP a few times over the years during the Christmas season that I think you'll find interesting: Theo...
Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Christmas Mirror

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A friend of mine writes a blog called Thought Sifter at which he recently posted a Christmas meditation titled The Christmas Mirror in whic...
Tuesday, December 20, 2016

The "Rational" Man

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Philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, in her book The Sovereignty of Good (1970) describes in vivid accents the modern man who prides hims...
Monday, December 19, 2016

Taking the Media with a Chunk of Salt

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For the last couple of weeks Republican electors who meet today to make the election of Donald Trump official, have had their lives threaten...
Saturday, December 17, 2016

The Russian Hack

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News reports and talk show discussions about the alleged Russian intervention in our election to tilt the outcome in favor of Trump have con...