Quality interweb mischief from Jared Bridges
Jackson Lears on polling: By the 1930’s, opinion pollsters believed they had discovered a cohesive mass audience—“the American public”—and a modal personality type—“the average American.” Since many Americans shared the pollsters’ naive faith in numbers, they accepted social scientists’ statistical constructions as accurte descriptions of themselves. The desire to fit in reinforced the normative power … Read more
Jason Steffens points out an op/ed from the Louisville Courier-Journal from last week pondering whether or not President Bush was indeed pro-life (I suppose I should read my city’s newspaper more often…). Glen Stassen, ethicist at Fuller Seminary, seems to think that President Bush has been bad for the pro-life movement because abrotions have increased … Read more
I caught an episode last night of Without A Trace, a mildly-entertaining FBI drama on CBS. Though the show focuses on kidnapping victims who vanish “without a trace,” there was more than a trace of hostility towards the pro-life position in last night’s show. The story was about a “Christian” family that was formerly involved … Read more
If you’re into horoscopes, a typical ice-breaker to conversation might be, “What’s your sign?” Ostensibly, if you know someone’s particular sign of the Zodiac, you already know a great deal about them. Many people read horoscopes with the same enthusiasm of reading a fortune cookie—they’re seen as merely forms of entertainment, never taken too seriously. … Read more
Albert Mohler has a great two-part essay [part one, part two] on “Christian Citizens and the News Media” that should be required reading before you next partake of the news. Mohler asks: The really important question is this: Are we any wiser? The explosion of media access has provided some real benefits for viewers. Competition … Read more
When James says that the “tongue is a fire,” he means to show that what we say can cause catastrophic damage. Blogger Euguene Volokh points out one such catastrophe in recent comments made by Jimmy Swaggart. Swaggart, the televangelist who once fell from prominence after he was found with a prostitute, apparently made the following … Read more
A recent AP piece dealing with the burgeoning problem of what to do with the extra frozen embryos used in in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures is downright spooky. Consider the actions of some clinics: The reverence that some clinics gave to the task surprised researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers University. Seven clinics … Read more
The whole Rathergate scandal with the forged documents regarding Bush’s National Guard service reminds me of how similar the free flow of information is to free markets. In the old media, information and subsequent analysis of information flowed through only a handful of sources. The advent of the blogosphere has now given rise to countless … Read more
Ben Stein writes a “letter to a soldier’s wife” in today’s WSJ: And [military wives] keep up the fight to keep the family whole even when they feel a lump of dread every time they turn on the news, every time they switch on the computer, every time the phone rings and every time — … Read more
The inner struggles of a person, with all their intricacies, tend to be handled in one of two ways by today’s theraputic culture. Either a person divulges without exception everything that is going on inside in an attempt to purge the demons that haunt them (demons usually from their childhood—not hell), or they simply leave … Read more