Sitting in a Pizza Hut just a block from Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Mina Rezkalla can’t stop telling me how much he loves Seinfeld. This is strange not least because Egypt is one of the most anti-Semitic countries in the world and Jerry Seinfeld’s eponymous television series is an exemplar of American Jewish humor. A 2010 […]

Something like eleven percent of the population still has a favorable view of Congress.  An appreciable percentage of those are probably Native Americans gloating as they contemplate the miserable mess the palefaces are making of their affairs, but except for hardcore America haters who like to watch the Congressional wrecking machine, the few people left […]

In its December 2011 issue Christianity Today carried an interview with Craig Keener, a New Testament historian teaching at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. He is the author of a recent book, Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts. Keener has a quarrel with most of his colleagues, who tend to dismiss these […]

From the Chronicle of Higher Education comes a story that should make every mediocre academic in this country shudder in fear.  Mark Bauerlein has looked under the hood of the “research” that professors in English literature conduct and he has documented what many of us know but few want to think about: nobody reads much […]

I’m saddened by the passing of Christopher Hitchens, a writer whose exquisite style I’ve admired for as long as I’ve been old enough to know what’s any good. Nevertheless, I can’t bring myself to properly mourn him without reflecting on his failings. All the encomia so far have been adulatory, and much of that is […]

Both those who say no and yes are right, in a way.

5,000 people dead, including 300 children. Hundreds, perhaps thousands missing. Ongoing violence. Gun battles in the streets, aerial bombardment of cities. Welcome to Syria, where the awesome moral force of the “duty to protect” can be seen in all its majesty and might. Every day we hear more about Butcher Assad’s war on activists, protestors, […]

The general's second career as a statesman has begun.

Like everyone who checks Instapundit on a regular basis, I come across all kinds of interesting news; yesterday Glenn offered a link to this National Review Online post by David French where one learns that young unmarried evangelicals are behaving very much like other unmarried young people.  80 percent of them are sexually active, compared to […]

“Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?” asks the voice of God from out of the whirlwind in the Book of Job (38:2). This week the answer would be Newt Gingrich, whose sloppy and misleading comment that the Palestinians are an “invented” people set off predictable reactions of outrage and mockery. Where […]