Latest Posts

Afterthoughts on the aftermath of the New Orleans flood

Eric Schansberg ponders the lessons that we can learn from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. One of Schansberg’s biggest questions in light of the government’s failure to effectively manage the disaster is this: if the government, both local and federal, failed at all levels to deal with Katrina before, during, and after it made landfall, shouldn’t we be looking for other options rather than trying to depend more on a system that obviously failed? Continue Reading...

The poor suffer most

Also from last week’s McLaughlin Group, Mort Zuckerman from U.S. News & World Report makes the important point that rising costs of gasoline greatly impact the poorest and most vulnerable populations. Continue Reading...

Let the market work

Check out this exchange, involving Tony Blankley from The Washington Times, Pat Buchanan of MSNBC, and Eleanor Clift of Newsweek, from last week’s McLaughlin Group about President Bush’s call for people to conserve gasoline in their daily activities: MR. Continue Reading...

Delta regions of the world, unite!

The current situation in New Orleans can be seen in part as a result of the circumstances and context of the city’s founding in 1718. According to one report, the French settled on the site for New Orleans in response to “the need to control the Mississippi River and its tributaries.” Continue Reading...

Tolerance: True and false

Pope Benedict XVI: “A tolerance which allows God as a private opinion but which excludes him from public life, from the reality of the world and our lives, is not tolerance but hypocrisy,” the pope said in the homily he gave at a three-week-long synod’s opening mass in St Peter’s Basilica. Continue Reading...

Corporate faith

Two stats featured in this month’s Go Figure section of Christianity Today: 17: Percentage of the top 50 Fortune 500 corporations’ foundations whose policies prohibit their giving to faith-based groups. Continue Reading...

Serenity now!

Why review a television show that never completed even its first season nearly three years ago? The confluence of events and circumstances that resulted in the cancellation of the Fox show Firefly in 2002 has done little to destroy the resiliency of the Firefly phenomenon. Continue Reading...

Homo Religiosus

An article by City University of New York professor Richard Wolin celebrates the legacy of Jürgen Habermas, who represents a shift from philosophers such as Marx and Nietzsche. “Among 19th-century thinkers it was an uncontestable commonplace that religion’s cultural centrality was a thing of the past,” but in the words of Habermas, “For the normative self-understanding of modernity, Christianity has functioned as more than just a precursor or a catalyst. Continue Reading...