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 [...]

Ignorance is no Defense

In a New York Times Op-ed (March 30) Kristof raises the critical issue of the remarkable ignorance of Americans. He points out that compared with the people of other developed countries Americans are ignorant as a people and the leaders they select relatively uninformed. He points to numerous studies, showing, for example, the remarkable percentage [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

Spirituality Misdefined

Consideration of the Templeton Prize offers an opening to understanding what the demand for greater spirituality in American life seems to come down to.
The most recent Templeton prize has been to Charles Taylor, a professor at Northwestern University. The Templeton Foundation was set up to study the “Big Questions”, ranging from questions about the [...]

Religion and Evolution

There has been another rash of religious discussions of religion-nonreligion controversies in the New York Times. One, by its religion editor, summarized some harsh criticisms of scientific god-bashers that have recently been issued by other scientists. Essentially, the criticism of the god-bashers is that their learning is not grounded sufficiently in theology to mount an effective [...]