Obama and judicial review

According to an editorial of The Wall Street Journal, President Barack Obama needs a remedial course in judicial review: President Obama is a former president of the Harvard Law Review and famously taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. But did he somehow not teach the historic case of Marbury v. Madison? That’s a [...]

Read Full Post »

Doing Violence to the Land

Jake is currently reading a book by agriculturalist Fred Bahnson and theologian Norman Wirzba entitled, Making Peace with the Land: God’s Call to Reconcile with Creation. The quotation below from Wallace Stegner demonstrates what happens when we, especially Christians, do violence to the land. Stegner writes: Instead of adapting, as we began to do, we [...]

Read Full Post »

Distinguishing Space From Place

Jake wrote a fine review of Craig G. Bartholomew’s book, Where Mortals Dwell: A Christian View of Place for Today, in the pages of Christianity Today. In that review he quotes one of the author’s principles: “although space and place are inseparable, place must be distinguished from space.” To flesh out that principle, consider Wallace Stegner’s brilliant insight below [...]

Read Full Post »

Transformative Education

I have earned three degrees in higher education: the first at a Christian liberal arts college (Wheaton College), the second at a public research university (Missouri School of Journalism), and the third at a secular liberal arts college (St. John’s College). The Graduate Institute of St. John’s College (Annapolis, MD; Santa Fe, NM) was – [...]

Read Full Post »

“You have to get over the color green”: Westernizing the perceptions

In the lengthy excerpt below, Wallace Stegner eloquently describes why so many visitors, especially Easterners, do not see the American West. Their perceptual habits have been trained elsewhere, thereby impoverishing their ability to behold beauty in strange forms. For the Great Plains readers of this blog, I challenge you to spend time in the Rocky [...]

Read Full Post »

Towns with small businesses are healthier

Hans Villarica in The Atlantic cites a study published recently on the effects of small businesses on the health of their communities. You can read the study yourself over at Business Report. Essentially, what the study authors argue is that there’s two conflicting possibilities for the health of towns with a strong small business sector, in contrast [...]

Read Full Post »

Social Conservatism, Big Government, and Moralism

Kimberly Strassel offers the most perceptive analysis I have read so far on Rick Santorum: General elections are not won on bases alone. They are won on the margins—with the votes of married, exurban women, of independents, of moderate men. Many of these voters are generally conservative. They are also generally open to, even reassured [...]

Read Full Post »

REVIEW: Darryl Hart, From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin

My review of Darryl Hart’s latest book, From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism, now appears on the Books & Culture website. Here are the opening paragraphs: Everyone loves an iconoclastic thesis, the kind that elicits a flabbergasted response of “Oh, really?!” Three immediately come to mind: in an [...]

Read Full Post »

“When you live underneath a sky that big, it’s hard to take yourself too seriously.” Lincoln in the Smithsonian

A really lovely piece about my home, Lincoln NE, in the Smithsonian. After those acid trip sunsets, that’s the thing about Lincoln that rocked my world. That you can’t really mess up too badly. You can marry too young, get a terrible tattoo or earn $12,000 a year, and the sky will not necessarily fall. [...]

Read Full Post »

Social Organization 101: How Ants Create Smart Society

While I’m at church on Sunday morning I set my television to record some political talk shows – ABC’s This Week with Christiane Amanpour and NBC’s Meet the Press with David Gregory – and a cultural program that offers a welcome antidote to the politicization of the public domain – CBS’s Sunday Morning. On a [...]

Read Full Post »