In a piece for The American Spectator earlier this week, Mark Tooley of IRD evaluates the global warming dust-up at the NAE. In “Prepare for Biblical Floods and Droughts,” Tooley especially criticizes the reaction of emergent church leader Brian McLaren, who used the examples of Noah and Joseph to argue for the legitimacy of a prophetic voice on climate change. Tooley writes that we can expect Global Warming to remain the main obsession of the evangelical left and of NAE...

Anyone concerned with good governance in the nonprofit sector — and it’s independence — should read the updated draft report on “principles of effective practice” issued by Independent Sector. The group has been working closely with the Senate Finance Committee, which for the past two years has been investigating abuses in the world of charities and nonprofits. The abuses, which usually involve excessive pensation and lavish perks, pop up with dreary regularity. A good example of this is what’s been...

Today’s NYT has an op-ed by Nicholas Kristof mending the work of micro-finance organizations, like Kiva, whom we’ve mentioned before. Kristof writes in “You, Too, Can Be a Banker to the Poor” (TimesSelect) that “Small loans to entrepreneurs are now widely recognized as an important tool against poverty.” He also rightly observes that “Web sites like Kiva are useful partly because they connect the donor directly to the beneficiary, without going through a bureaucratic and expensive layer of aid groups...

I have tried to read everything that I can find the time to digest on the subject of global warming. I saw Al Gore’s award-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” and even had some nice things to say about it. I have always been put off by the use of terms like “environmental whackos” and “earthist nut balls” from the political right. There is, in my humble opinion, little doubt that the earth is getting warmer. What is in great doubt...

I’ve discussed previously plex interrelationships between the next-generation gaming consoles and hi-def DVD formats, especially plicated by the pornification of culture and technology. So far I’ve focused on the battle between Sony’s PS3 (paired with the Blu-ray format) and the Xbox 360 (paired with the HD-DVD format), and argued that the hi-def formats rather than the porn industry itself would act as a decisive influence. In an recent Newsweek article, Brian Braiker conclusively exposes the vacuous nature of the often...

The effort to create a top-level domain suffix for adult Web sites has failed, for the third time (HT: X3). ICANN voted 9-5 to defeat the proposal, which was roundly opposed by an unlikely alliance of religious groups and the adult entertainment industry. The proposal would have created a new “.xxx” suffix that would have allowed voluntary participation of adult content providers. Many in that line of work are concerned that such a voluntary program could e mandatory, “pushing them...

Hey, what can I say – sometimes in the great war to save Gaia, you have to do some… unsavory things, like killing baby polar bears so they don’t have to suffer the humiliation of being raised by humans after being rejected by their mothers. With an assist from our resident Photoshop genius, Jonathan Spalink, I humbly present this artistic token of support to our friends in the environmental movement, in the hopes that it will help them to educate...

John Armstrong’s thoughtful post below reminds me of the critiques of Jim Wallis offered in this space, here, here, and here (by Armstrong himself). And over at FirstThings today, Joseph Bottum, courtesy of David Brooks, gives me a term that I hadn’t encountered and that serves well as a moniker for the phenomenon Wallis embodies: “beyondism.” As in the effort (or rather the claim) to “get beyond” partisan polemics. As Bottum astutely observes, the program of the beyondist usually can...

I saw a spate of headlines over the weekend that proclaimed something like, “Now scientists create a sheep that’s 15% human.” 15% human? Really? Isn’t that like being “a little pregnant”? Followers of this blog may already know that I’ve written a fair bit, most of it disapproving (at least with respect to the newest genetic innovations), on the creation of chimeras. One of the concerns raised about this latest effort is the potentially devastating effects of so-called “silent” viruses,...

Despite all the hoopla surrounding the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, all is not well with the dream of a united Europe — at least as it’s envisioned by the political class and Brussels technocrats. In addition to its ongoing economic malaise, the European Union still seems unable to fully acknowledge its cultural, religious and political roots. “People who suffer from amnesia have great difficulty making sound choices about the future because they do not know where they...