Gene Edward Veith Jr.'s Blog, page 114

America’s first Independent president?

Donald Trump not only beat the Democrats.  Before that, he beat the Republicans. Dan Balz argues that Trump, in effect, is America’s first Independent president. He doesn’t mention it, but Bernie Sanders is an actual Independent, who ran in the Democratic primaries.  So this was the year a big proportion of Americans voted against both party [Read More...]

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Reproduction as resurrection

Peter Leithart gives a splendid reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 3, in which he is trying to persuade his “fair young friend” (contrary to the homosexual readings of the sonnets) to get married and have children. Leithart shows how Shakespeare and his age thought of what it means to have children, including the connection of sexuality [Read More...]

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Trump is already keeping jobs in U.S.

Donald Trump is already fulfilling his campaign promise to keep jobs in America.  The air-conditioning manufacturer Carrier will keep 1,000 jobs in Indiana, rather than moving them to Mexico as planned.  Trump pulled this off with personal negotiation and promises of tax relief (as well as state subsidies from Vice-president-elect Mike Pence’s Indiana). Some liberals [Read More...]

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Euthanizing alcoholics

A man in the Netherlands was euthanized because he was an alcoholic. The story excerpted and linked after the jump gives a vivid and tragic description of what happened. The Netherlands changed the law to allow for physician assisted suicide in cases not just of terminal illness but of “unbearable suffering,” which includes personal and [Read More...]

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Conversion as sacrament

BreakPoint editor G. Shane Morris, who now believes in infant baptism, explains why most of his fellow evangelicals don’t.  He says that the reason is not so much differences in Biblical interpretation, but rather the tendency to understand a conversion experience in sacramental terms.  Thus the sacrament of conversion replaces the sacrament of baptism as the rite [Read More...]

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Abortion rate is lowest since before Roe v. Wade

The abortion rate has dropped to the lowest point since 1971, two years before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion nation-wide.  The rate, according to the latest figures which are from 2013, is now 12.5 abortions per 1,000 pregnancies.  That is half what it was in the 1980s. But this still means some 900,000 abortions per [Read More...]

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Getting rid of Trump via the 25th amendment

The latest fantasy on the left of how they can get rid of Donald Trump involves invoking the 25th amendment. I’m glad for the new interest in the Constitution, but the procedure for dropping a president who is “unfit for office” would require the complicity of the Vice President, the Cabinet, and both houses of Congress. That [Read More...]

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Now that men can become pregnant. . .

Now that gender has been disassociated from biology and is a matter of personal self-identification, a man can become pregnant.  (That is, someone born with female organs but who self-identifies as a man has to be considered as a man.  If “he” hasn’t had sex-reassignment surgery and has sex with a biological man–I suppose we would have [Read More...]

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“Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows”

Studying the prophecies of Christ in the Old Testament during Advent is a good exercise.  They tell us much about Him. Consider Isaiah 53, which takes up deep into the life of Christ and unpacks the exactly what happened in His atoning death on the Cross, while also pointing to His Resurrection. Especially striking to me is [Read More...]

“What good is a road if it doesn’t lead to a church?”

Rod Dreher has interviewed Eugene Vodolazkin, the author of Laurus, which we posted about yesterday.  Read what he has to say.  Sample: During the perestroika period, we had a great film, Repentance, by the Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze . It’s a movie about the destruction wrought by the Soviet past. The last scene of the film shows a woman baking [Read More...]