Daniel C. Peterson's Blog, page 1251

Unfortunately, she didn’t quite live to see the Millennium

    Irena Sendler died in 2008.   In 2009, Barack Obama, still less than a year after he had inaugurated the era of universal harmony that we now enjoy, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for not being George W. Bush.    

“Beau Jest”

    Just back from a performance of Beau Jest at the Hale Center Theater in Orem.   Part of the play is built around a Passover seder, which we enjoyed because we’ve conducted a fair number of such seders and are therefore familiar with the prayers and the songs and the various ritual acts involved. [Read More...]

A woman genuinely worth admiration

    During the Second World War, Irena Sendler, a Polish Roman Catholic nurse and social worker, received permission to travel into and out of the Warsaw ghetto as a plumbing/sewer specialist.   She had an ulterior motive.   Irena smuggled Jewish infants out of the Ghetto in the bottom of the toolbox that she [Read More...]

“Gran Hotel”: My latest guilty little pleasure

      I’m a sucker for stories, and especially for mysteries.   If I’m walking through a room where somebody’s watching an episode of, say, Law and Order, and I happen to see the first few minutes (in other words, the discovery of a puzzling death or murder), it takes superhuman self-control not to [Read More...]

“The Myth of Republican Racism”

    Within just the past day or two, I’ve been subjected, once again, to several comments on my blog and elsewhere asserting that conservatives (e.g., Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Allen West, Shelby Steele, and Condoleeza Rice, perhaps?) oppose Barack Obama only because he’s black, that the Tea Party dislikes Obamacare because it might disproportionately benefit [Read More...]

Touring the House of the Lord

    With another couple, my wife and I drove up to Ogden, Utah, earlier today, where we toured the newly “renovated” — that’s the understatement of the year! — and soon-to-be-rededicated Ogden Utah Temple.   It’s an impressive building, and we were pleased by the number of paintings (or reproductions of paintings) in it that we [Read More...]

“The Golf Address”

      It’s been pointed out to me by several astute observers of American politics that only right-wing crazies who unthinkingly take their talking points from Fox News are criticizing Barack Obama about his tendency to concentrate on his swing while ignoring crises in Syria, in Iraq, on the Mexican border, in St. Louis, [Read More...]

“Obama Announces New ISIS Sanctions”

    http://www.nationalreview.com/article...   Thanks to my longtime friend Scott Woolley for bringing this item to my attention.    

Can you sense any inconsistency here?

    The very vocal feminist Gloria Steinem — now, astonishingly (to a geezer like me, anyway), eighty years old — spoke to a mostly Muslim university audience in Cairo roughly thirty-five years ago, and I was there.   She denounced patriarchal oppression in religions, and, with remarkable courage (given her location), singled out Catholicism, [Read More...]

The “New Atheist” Richard Dawkins, Down Syndrome children, and one writer’s very personal response

    http://www.nationalreview.com/article...