Well…except Goliath is mostly a good guy too– and he’s the one putting rocks in the air– and David got beat in this case by the government. From yesterday’s (Louisville) Courier-Journal, Charlie White and Sara Cunningham report on the stand-off between homeowner David McCarty and the local Wal-Mart under construction in Lebanon, KY. Complying with a court order, a Central Kentucky man yesterday ended his sit-down protest a few feet from a blasting site — part of the construction of...

Normally, I’m not a huge fan of Congressman John Dingell. But on this issue, I have to at least give him points for honesty: Democrats took over Congress vowing to make global warming a top priority, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi planned to notch a quick victory with a bill that was long on political symbolism and cost, if short on actual emissions reductions. Standing in her way has been Mr. Dingell. Much to the speaker’s consternation, the powerful chairman...

Sonny Bunch reviewed “The Call of the Entrepreneur” and discussed the significance of the American Film Renaissance (AFR) in The Weekly Standard. His article is titled, “The Right Stuff: Conservatives decide if you can’t beat Hollywood, join it.” In his piece, Bunch discussed the goals of AFR: AFR has been hosting film festivals across the country since 2004, but the Hubbards hope to set up permanent shop in Washington and push the festival into the mainstream. Jim Hubbard says he...

The folks over at the Reformation21 blog, produced of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, have a great discussion going about the spiritual, cultural, and pastoral implications of pornography (here, here, and here). The first post takes up the Naomi Wolf article, “The Porn Myth,” which also occasioned in part my reflections on the pornification of culture in general and technology in particular. Carl Trueman aptly wonders (in the second post), Could it be that pornography is the ultimate free market...

Freemasonry has been deemed to be worthy of protection under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA). Does this mean that freemasonry is a “religion”? A California court of appeals statement said in part, “We see no principled way to distinguish the earnest pursuit of these (Masonic) principles … from more widely acknowledged modes of religious exercise.” That’s a stance the Christian Reformed Church would probably agree with. As I’ve noted before, the CRC’s position on...

“The mission in Iraq may be on the way to being plished…” So says Bartle Bull in Prospect magazine (HT). Maybe we should start thinking of the first declaration of “mission plished” (May 1, 2003, pictured above) as a sort of D-Day, and the imminent(?) “mission plished” as a sort of V-E Day (that’s also mon analogy used to describe the “already/not yet” dynamic of the times between Christ’s first and ing.) See also, “Democracy in Iraq.” ...

Erika Andersen reviewed the “The Call of the Entrepreneur” for Human Events in a piece titled, “Entrepreneurship Preserves Life as We Know It.” The Call premiered last week to DC audiences at the E Street Cinema, as part of the Renaissance Film Festival. In her article Andersen noted the international interest in the film: Though it initially seems like the tale of the American dream, “The Call of the Entrepreneur” is an international story and is now being translated into...

Society is changing as economic freedom and diversification gradually creep into the Middle East. Dr. Samuel Gregg, director of research at the Acton Institute, explores the effects of free trade on nations including Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates and, in turn, the effect those nations are having on their neighbors. The diversification of economies, notably the development of new products and services for export, allows nations to grow out of reliance on oil production as the main...

I used to have more regular and extensive interaction with people whose worldviews were starkly different from my own. That’s not so much the case anymore, so it’s good to be reminded occasionally that some people live in different worlds that are sometimes hard prehend. That happened today when I came across an announcment for a conference, “The Secular Society and Its Enemies.” In the strange universe in which the conference’s organizers live, “The world is finally waking up to...

How’s this for an expression of un-Christian retributiveness? If God wants to make my plete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before their death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one’s enemies – but not before they have been hanged. –Heinrich Heine, Gedanken und Überlegungen; quoted and translated in Freud,...