Gene Edward Veith Jr.'s Blog, page 357

Fixing my technological fix

Friends, there has been some good discussion about yesterday’s post regarding the comments on this blog.  No sooner, of course, did the Patheos tech people implement the changes but, before I could even explain them, someone started flagging everything, resulting in a “flagocalypse.”  So to prevent any one person from doing that, or from flagging [Read More...]

Demonic possession & exorcism in Indiana?

The Indianapolis Star reports on a case of apparent demon possession and successful exorcism in Gary, Indiana.  I don’t know what I think of all of this, but this case–complete with walking on a ceiling and many other seemingly supernatural manifestations–is unusually well-attested, with police witnesses, psychologists, the Department of Child Services,  and the Roman [Read More...]

Obamacare update

So where do we stand with Obamacare, now that HealthCare.gov is more or less working?  Michael Gerson reports: The early returns are in. A large majority of the 2.2 million people who had purchased insurance on the exchanges by year-end — 65 percent to 90 percent, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal — already had [Read More...]

A technological fix for my New Year’s blog resolution?

So, how are you doing with your New Year’s resolution to monitor the comments on your blog and establish a higher tone of discourse?   That was the gist of what one of this blog’s readers put to me, making the point that the personal insults, hi-jacking of threads, and offensive comments have come back in [Read More...]

J. Gresham Machen on the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod

J. Gresham Machen was one of the 20th century’s leading Reformed theologians, a Princeton faculty member who battled the rise of liberal theology.  Rod Rosenbladt sent me a copy of an article that Dr. Machen wrote on the “Ordination Pledge” in which he discusses his appreciation for the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, including the personal [Read More...]

Food porn

Pornography involves watching somebody else have sex.  In South Korea, there is a new fad of watching somebody else eat.  It’s being called “gastronomical voyeurism.” The news story, excerpted after the jump, speculates on some reasons:  More and more Koreans are living by themselves and miss the social interaction of eating with someone.  Many Koreans [Read More...]

Pulling the plug on a brain-dead woman and her living fetus

A Texas court ordered that life-support be removed from a woman who was considered brain-dead, in accord with her husband’s wishes.  The hospital, though, had been keeping her body going because she was pregnant. So now both the mother and her child are dead. The developing child was 23-weeks old.  Why couldn’t they have waited [Read More...]

Live blogging the State of the Union

Tonight at 9:00 p.m. ET will be the President’s State of the Union Address.  I invite you to live blog it here via the comments.  (What you do is have your computer ready as you watch and listen to the speech.  Make comments as the speech unfolds.  Remember to refresh your screen so that everyone [Read More...]

Lutherans, Catholics, & Orthodox

We may have solved, with the help of James R. Rogers, our perennial question of why evangelicals tend to be more likely to embrace Calvinism than Lutheranism.  But our other perennial question is why evangelicals, when they want something different–particularly, sacraments and liturgy–go the way of Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy, rushing right past Lutheranism.  [Read More...]

Jesse James meets the Second Amendment

If there should ever be a monument to the Second Amendment, it should be erected in Northfield, Minnesota. In this little college town in 1876, Jesse James and Cole Younger, with six other members of their gang, tried to rob the First National Bank, only to get shot up by an aroused citizenry.  I just [Read More...]