Gene Edward Veith Jr.'s Blog, page 431
February 7, 2013
Sacramone’s free magazine for college students
Whatever happened to Anthony Sacramone, you may ask? He of the blog Strange Herring. Formerly of the blog Luther at the Movies. The satirical Lutheran who blogs with manic intensity until he seemingly burns himself out and stops blogging for months, until he starts again with a slightly new identity. Well, I have learned that [...]
February 6, 2013
Three Lutheran churches on the life issue
Lutheran ethicist Robert Benne attended the March for Life, which occasioned some interesting reflections on how different Lutheran church bodies approach the abortion controversy. The Missouri Synod had gathered several hundred with whom we marched. Lutherans for Life—an umbrella organization—provided an additional banner under which another couple hundred marched. However, a stunning realization came to [...]
Liberals are not relativists (unfortunately)
Conservative intellectual and Princeton Professor Robert George points out that liberals are not relativists at all. Rather, they are moralistic dogmatists: Contemporary left liberals are hardly relativists! I often wish they were. They are moralists—moralists on a mission. The mission is to shape political and social life, and, to the extent possible, individual belief, in [...]
Staffing the Obamacare bureaucracy
Now we must staff the bureaucracy required to run Obamacare. This may at least put a dent in unemployment, but at untold costs, not just to the federal government but to states and insurance companies. For example, the law requires the hiring of thousands of “navigators,” whose purpose is to help people pick out an [...]
February 5, 2013
What consenting adults do in private
“Jesus Christ in the conversation embarrassed her the way sex did her mother.” So said Flannery O’Connor of one of her characters in the short story “The Displaced Person.” Sex, though, today is out in the open. But religion, to be socially and politically acceptable, must be closeted. The great sociologist Peter Berger (a Lutheran) [...]
Finding and seeing Richard III
We blogged about how archeologists have discovered what they thought was the skeleton of King Richard III, the monarch who, according to Shakespeare’s play of the same name, murdered his way to the crown until he was killed at the Battle of Bosworth field (“a horse! My kingdom for a horse!”) by Henry, the Earl [...]
Al-Qaeda 2.0
Al-Qaeda is back. And, according to David Ignatius, the new version is going to be even harder to battle, particularly since our former Arab allies in the war on terrorism have now been taken over by Islamists. He uses the metaphor of a metastasizing cancer: The Obama administration is working with its allies to frame [...]
February 4, 2013
Who won the Superbowl?
The Baltimore Ravens, of course, holding off a jaw-dropping comeback by the 49ers in an extremely thrilling game. The title of this post refers to who won the Superbowl contest sponsored by this blog by predicting the outcome. The final score was Ravens 34; 49ers 31. So the Ravens won by 3. Therefore our virtual [...]
Accommodation on Obamacare mandate?
The Obama administration released new guidelines meant to resolve the issue of religious institutions having to provide free contraceptive and abortifacient coverage under Obamacare. This will have no effect on businesses run by pro-life individuals, who will still have to provide the coverage. Read details after the jump. So is this a solution? From CNN: [...]
Destroying the Boy Scouts
The Boy Scouts are caught between Scylla and Charybdis–or, as more of them might put it less classically, a rock and a hard place. The organization has had to deal with scandals involving gay scoutmasters and some incidents of child sexual abuse. So it tightened its standards and its scrutiny. Now the organization is under [...]
