Jim Leach’s Address to the Convention

For me, the most useful speech at the conventions was the short discussion by former Republican Representative Jim Leach of Iowa. He used a discussion of some of the best features of our political tradition as a background to his commitment to supporting Obama.
The full text of Jim Leach’s Speech to Democratic National Convention follows:
“As [...]

Sex in an Enlightened Society

Elliot Spitzer has been caught in a media and federal web for arranging to meet a prostitute in a Washington hotel. He has now resigned as Governor of New York. This is only the latest in an endless series of political and social tragedies dating back to prehistory. Thinking about this “crime”, several points need [...]

Existentialism, or the Missing Ingredient?

The other day I read about a popular Harvard professor who was still attached to the existentialists of the recent past, such as Sartre and Camus. Without knowing much about them, I too have thought that something like existentialism must be the life philosophy of the enlightened. Unfortunately, when I then went back and looked [...]

Economics 101: A New Look

When I was a beginning “soft social scientist” around 1950, it was always assumed that there was only one “hard” social science — economics. The reasoning was simple. Economics dealt with real figures and it used mathematics to manipulate these figures. This had been the road to success of the natural sciences and it was [...]

Wikipedia and Enlightenment

A recent New York Times magazine article on Wikipedia (Magazine, July 1) reminded me just how significant this encyclopedia is. It provides an instant access, free source of knowledge on almost anything (now over 1.8 million articles in the English section alone; it offers articles in 250 languages). Anyone can contribute, adding anything from a [...]

Sex and the Social Order

The obsession of Americans with sexual behavior diminishes both the common welfare and sense of justice of both Islamic and American people. It leads both groups to exclude from society large numbers of people who would otherwise be of service to the larger society, people who have, in any event, a right to liberty and [...]

Democracy Demands an Informed and Rational Public: Al Gore

In his new book, “The Assault on Reason”, Al Gore makes the case that our democracy is in trouble, and indeed our civilization is in trouble”, because of the decline in rational thought on all levels, especially in regard to public policy. He is not saying that we lack rational thinkers, but rather that the [...]

Religion in Politics

Paul Krugman, the New York Times Op-Ed columnist offers (4/13/07) some worrisome facts about the influence of the Christian right in the present administration (and beyond that more generally in Republican circles). He points out that Regent University, founded by Pat Robertson, boasts that it has 150 graduates working in the Bush administration. We should [...]

Twisting the Just War Doctrine: Ideological Thinking

The religion editor in today’s New York Times (4/14/07) discusses the continuing effort of George Weigel, a lay theologian and activist often identified with the neocons, to show that the war in Iraq and all we have done there is consonant with the Just War Doctrine, so central to moral discourse, particularly among Roman Catholics. [...]

Morality and Evolution

A couple of recent articles in the Times (one in the Science section) have again raised the question of the origins of morality. One discusses a study of Chimpanzees that demonstrated their ability to empathize with one another. (“Sympathize” is something else again; the difference should be considered.) They would sense that an individal needed [...]