As Rick Bohan noted in a comment the other day, Rod Dreher has liberated himself from his Templeton imprisonment–where he was hired to blog and then told not to blog–and is back on the job, tickling the keyboard over at The American Conservative. Heretofore hight Crunchy Con, Dreher is far from everybody’s cup of tea. But he gathered quite a following on the old Beliefnet, serving up his distinctive brand of Dostoevskian confessional angst.

If you don’t often agree with Dreher, at least you can hope to find him stressing over the orthodoxies of his fellow conservatives. He’s always made a point of distinguishing religion from politics. And unlike many a scribbler, he’s prepared to vote with his feet. Having grown increasingly distressed at the Catholic bishops’ handling of clerical sexual abuse, he jumped back over the Tiber and betook himself to the odd pastures of the Orthodox Church in America, earning the ire of Richard John Neuhaus, which is hardly a bad recommendation.

Since AmCon proprietor Pat Buchanan is pretty much persona non grata in the conservative movement these days, I suppose Rod feels that he’s now in the right company. Yesterday and today, he has popped the Tea Party as fake populism and twice nodded approval at the Occupiers of Wall Street. His readers seem pretty sympathetic. You go, boy!