Opinion
COMMENTARY: Showdown at the O.K. Corral
By Tom Ehrich — May 5, 2009
(UNDATED) One day in 1965, while driving north to visit relatives in South Bend, Ind., we reached Kokomo and saw that a tornado had virtually leveled a Chrysler factory. It seemed tragic. How could Kokomo survive without Chrysler? Although Kokomo dodged that bullet, it might not escape today’s overlapping “tornadoes”: sea changes in global trade […]
Day of Prayer
By Mark Silk — May 5, 2009
President Obama’s decision to issue a Proclamation for the National Day of Prayer but take a pass on the East Room festivities laid on by his predecessor seems pretty much of a piece with James Madison’s efforts to walk the line between custom and constitutional mandate in the matter of presidential religious leadership. As Madison […]
Ave atque vale, Jack
By Mark Silk — May 4, 2009
I spent a little time covering Jack Kemp for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution during his unsuccessful presidential campaign for the 1988 GOP presidential nomination. He was a relentless character who attached his personal ambition to economic idees fixes Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:”Table Normal”; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:””; mso-padding-alt:0in […]
Torture Gap
By Mark Silk — May 1, 2009
Andrew Sullivan, who’s been serving as Anti-Torture Tribune of the Blogosphere, is seriously distressed by Pew’s new finding that the more people go to church, the more likely they are to support torture. I guess this wouldn’t have surprised Torquemada–but to be fair, white evangelicals (as we already know) are more down with torture than […]
Notre Obama
By Mark Silk — May 1, 2009
Catholics may not love Obama as much as Muslims, Jews, and Nones, but a 67 percent approval rating isn’t anything to sneeze at. That’s four points higher than the national approval rating. Given that Catholics supported Obama in the election at just the national rate of 53 percent, it means that he is now outperforming […]
Hispanics support gay marriage?
By Mark Silk — May 1, 2009
According to a new Quinnipiac poll, 27 percent of blacks, 38 percent of whites, and 52 percent of Hispanics support same-sex marriage. The same poll has 48 percent of blacks, 56 percent of whites, and 71 percent of Hispanics in favor of repealing the law against gays and lesbians serving openly in the military. Forty-five […]
COMMENTARY: Rome’s burning, so why are we fiddling?
By Tracy Gordon — April 30, 2009
(UNDATED) Is our population — as obsessed as it is with the trivial — capable of recognizing a crisis, much less mustering the disciplined response necessary to aggressively and intelligently resolve it? If Nero fiddled while Rome burned, how significant would it be for an entire nation of Americans to take up fiddling while our […]
Obama Romana
By Mark Silk — April 30, 2009
Yesterday Rome spoke on The 100 Days and found that they were…not as bad as feared. According to the front-page story in L’Osservatore Romano, President Obama has operated with laudable caution, including on matters of ethics and morals. Notably, the pope’s paper found reason to praise the administration’s proposed guidelines for funding stem cell research […]
COMMENTARY: Bruce Cockburn, global tourguide
By Cathleen Falsani — April 29, 2009
(UNDATED) Mali. Mozambique. Central America. The Himalayas. Kosovo. I’ve never been to any of these exotic locales, but I feel as if I have because of the more than 30 years of music made by Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn. He is, in a very real way, a citizen of the world. Apart from being one […]
Doctrinaire
By Mark Silk — April 29, 2009
Today’s Gallup poll on The First Hundred Days suggests that Obama has shrunk his religion gap. Whereas 41 percent of weekly worship attenders and 61 percent of seldom or never attenders supported him just before the election, now the numbers are 69 57 percent and 57 69 percent respectively. Thus the gap between the two […]
Friedmania
By Mark Silk — April 29, 2009
Defending the Obama approach to torture, Tom Friedman claims that 1) prosecuting the malefactors (up to and including George W. Bush) would “rip our country apart”; and 2) torturing was justified because only torture was capable of deterring al Qaeda, an enemy like no other we have ever had. The first claim is guesswork, but […]
COMMENTARY: Spreading the Good News, one tweet at a time
By Tom Ehrich — April 28, 2009
(UNDATED) A week ago, I had little firsthand knowledge about Facebook and other “social networking” tools. I had read a lot about Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn. I had opened accounts. I occasionally clicked “Yes” when friends invited me into their networks. But otherwise, I had little direct experience with this burgeoning Web phenomenon, in […]
But who’s counting?
By Mark Silk — April 28, 2009
Arlen Specter’s party switch leaves just one Jewish Republican serving in Congress–House GOP whip Eric Cantor (R-Va).
Mighty Righty
By Mark Silk — April 28, 2009
A decade ago, conservative syndicated columnist Cal Thomas won some liberal props for criticizing the religious right in Blinded by Might, a book he wrote with Grand Rapids megachurch pastor Ed Dobson. Thomas and Dobson were old comrades-in-arms of Jerry Falwell–Thomas VP of the Moral Majority and Dobson associate pastor of Falwell’s Thomas Road Baptist […]
Religious dropouts
By Mark Silk — April 27, 2009
In today’s release of the follow-up to its 2007 Landscape Survey, Pew offers an answer to the intriguing question: Which major Christian tradition is most likely to have its members drop out of religion. (Pew calls these folks “unaffiliated,” we at ARIS call them Nones–I won’t argue the point here.) The answer, in the immortal […]
