by Steve Smith and I were thinking along the same lines about the conundrum of whether to wish folks a Merry Christmas. My dilemma was in sorting my holiday/Christmas cards into the right piles, since some new folks have come onto the list, by marriage or otherwise. The debate over whether Christans have an obligation always to tell [...]
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by At this time of year we hear arguments about how to greet people, in person or on cards and such. Some people find the traditional greeting “Merry Christmas” to be offensive and uncivil– a few years ago, Step Feldman wrote an interesting book with the title Please Don’t Wish Me a Merry Christmas– but others [...]
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by The box office success of the education documentary Waiting for Superman, and the much-publicized resignations of the top education administrators in Washington, D.C. and New York City (Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein) have focused new attention on charter schools. Meanwhile, charter schools have become a new battleground in church/state fights, as dioceses convert inner city [...]
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by The annual battle over Christmas and the separation of Church and State is on. In Philadelphia, the city’s Managing Director ordered the word “Christmas” removed from sign at the entrance to the “German Christmas Village” at City Hall. The Mayor then countermanded him, and directed that “Christmas” be put back. See here. (For one response, [...]
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by John Shimkus, a member of Congress from Illinois, has received international attention recently for a statement that he made at a congressional hearing on climate change in March 2009. Shimkus said, “The earth will end only when God declares that it is time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth.” He cited Genesis [...]
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by By now, I suspect many of you have seen the text of the new Oklahoma amendment to its state constitution – an amendment that received 70% of the vote in a recent referendum – which states, in part, that “The Courts . . . when exercising their judicial authority . . . shall not consider [...]
Read the full postYesterday I attended The Royal Society’s conference entitled “Geoengineering – Taking Control of Our Planet’s Climate.” The Royal Society is 350-year-old group of elite scientists that “encourages public debate on key issues involving science.” I confess that the only member of the Society’s board whom I recognized was HRH William, the Prince of Wales, whose [...]
Read the full postI’ve brought up here from time to time an issue that worries me, but that doesn’t worry others much: how serious and threatening is the division between people who adhere to what James Davison Hunter called the “orthodox” position– conservative Christians and devout Jews, mostly– and the adherents of the “progressive” position– secularists, more liberal [...]
Read the full postThe failure of Congress to enact a climate change law, like the failure of last December’s Copenhagen meeting to produce a new international climate change treaty, has provoked various responses from the proponents of such measures. A recent article in the New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/11/101011fa_fact_lizza) cast blame on Republicans (for being obstructionists), Democrats (for being timid), [...]
Read the full postA recent article in the Economist (“Whose Law Counts Most“) has sparked another round of controversy regarding religious arbitration in the United States. On the heels of the article, a number of thoughtful blog posts have also grappled with the issue (see, e.g., Volokh, Volokh, and CoOp). Abroad, religious arbitration has frequently faced significant opposition (best [...]
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