Monday December 09, 2019

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user warning: Table './conserva_drupal/cache_filter' is marked as crashed and should be repaired query: UPDATE cache_filter SET data = 'TRUTH: December 3, 2019\n<img alt=\"\" src=\"http://conservativechronicle.com/sites/default/files/Murchison.gif\" style=\"width: 300px; height: 116px;\" />\nThe Anglican Church of Canada clutches its throat at the prospect of — Lord have mercy — shutting down its ministries and works 20 years from now. You know — putting up the “Closed” sign, the public demand for said ministries dwindling more with every passing year. So sharply have Anglican membership rolls declined since 2000 that, according to an internal study, naught but the buildings will remain in 2040.\n WHICH, as many will recognize, is an odd assumption to entertain concerning any of the Lord’s enterprises — the same Lord who parted the Red Sea (I’ll come back to this) and seems easily capable of repopulating empty churches and moving powerfully forward. Canadian Anglicanism’s prospects nevertheless put in mind the consequences of life in an age when, seemingly, you don’t have to believe anything. \n The ongoing deconstruction of belief — the dismissal of truths you or others see as nontruths — leaves humans free to believe as they like. “Truth”? Who says so, pal? Falsehood? What might that be but someone else’s truth turned around and dressed in new clothes? \n Truth happens to be the special currency of religion. A church — a faith — invites acceptance of its premises, presenting them as needful and valid. Say you don’t want to believe. In that event, you keep away from the church and its ancient truths, such as that very instrumental truth we hear of every year at this time: the Savior’s birth. \n We’re constantly encouraged to get rid of unwanted beliefs. We are well acquainted, for instance, with “fake news,” meaning anything disparaging of President Donald Trump. Trump’s trope isn’t unique. The Never-Trump media, the impeachment lobby — these groups take pleasure in dismissing Trumpian rhetoric as shot through with lies and frauds.\n WHO STARTED the great set-to over credibility in politics is unclear — probably both sides, each reacting to the other. Wrong and right lack their former statuses as political touchstones. It’s all opinion, point of view, real stuff versus made-up junk. A phone call to the Ukraine is either “perfect” or an impeachable offense. How do we know which, the standards for verification having been compromised? The very possibility of verification — from the Latin “veritas,” meaning “truth” — having been bent out of shape? \n You can see how, in such an environment, Christianity’s “truth” claims can be seen as wobbly, and participation in Christian rites — in Canada at least — seen as a time-wasting enterprise. \n So “prove” to me God opened that Red Sea! Prove it how? With a cellphone shot? Nah, some Hebrew PR guy could have faked the shot. We can’t, it seems, in experiential terms, prove squat. Try to show me in physical terms you did what you said you did. Either I trust you or I don’t. \n Here we are, adrift on a vast sea of claims and counterclaims. Canadian Anglicanism’s plight stems — if I may tender a claim of my own — from the shriveling of the human capacity for belief in the unseen. What happened to authority as credibly worked out in teaching and practice over long ages? It savors of “authoritarianism,” doesn’t it? Actually, no. Authoritarianism is someone making you do certain things. Authority is ancestral, made more credible by the witness of the credible. You can call the Virgin birth of Jesus, the origin point of the present season, fake news if you like, but that’s just your unvarnished opinion — against the grave and loving testimony of minds and mouths designated over the centuries as wise and fruitful. \n Nobody in the 21st century can compel belief in the perfection of Trump’s phone calls or in the right of the New York Times to consign the caller to the ninth circle of political hell. Yet where does this leave us? Swaying back and forth, forever and ever, between competing viewpoints? Uncertain what to believe and what not to? Disabled from the planting of things beautiful to us but, for all anyone knows, worthless to life at large?\n THE PAST half-century or so of American history, with its takedown of authority and truth, makes inevitable the moral frenzy that is our daily bread. And will, say, impeachment help to make truth accessible, credible as in the olden time? Pardon me as I roll on the ground, laughing hysterically.\n', created = 1575889335, expire = 1575975735, headers = '', serialized = 0 WHERE cid = '2:a4cf3d9bb8ffd0ebddf17c9235184b21' in /home/conserva/public_html/includes/cache.inc on line 112.
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user warning: Table './conserva_drupal/cache_filter' is marked as crashed and should be repaired query: UPDATE cache_filter SET data = 'THANKSGIVING: November 29, 2019\n<img alt=\"\" src=\"http://conservativechronicle.com/sites/default/files/Murchison.gif\" />\nBeyond the impeachment mess surrounding President Donald Trump, which is due to be settled one of these days — I think in Trump’s favor, but what do I know? — beyond the impeachment mess, I was starting to declare, sprawls before us ... what, exactly? More messes of similarly degrading character?\n I SHOULDN’T wonder. Impeachment, successful or the reverse, will settle nothing in these Disunited States of America. Where everything’s a brawl. And nobody likes anybody. And working your opponents over with brass knuckles is the accepted way of making known your devotion to the joys of Free Speech and Discussion. \n Happy Thanksgiving. \n Why not, when staking out personal positions on the moral worth of Nancy Pelosi and her presidential adversary, cast a backward glance at the ideal free speech supposedly serves: namely, the ideal of freedom itself, in the cause of peace — conflict suppressed by the reasoned negotiation of differences? \n Those would be, I suppose, the differences we want to quieten, as distinguished from those we relish. Those, say, over Chick-fil-A and its own free speech rights, exemplified by its charitable giving program. As everyone with a live brain cell is aware, Chick-fil-A can’t get it completely right as to same-sex marriage. Giving to organizations that defend two-sex marriage got the fried chicken outfit in trouble in the first place — trouble that seems only to have increased since the company cut funding to two same-sex-marriage-denying institutions, namely, the Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. \n If, by electing to focus on “a smaller number of organizations working exclusively in the areas of education, homelessness and hunger,” Chick-fil-A hoped to cool the fires of controversy, the plan didn’t quite work. The Salvation Army is possibly the greatest and most beloved of all Christian service organizations. How, then, did it get caught up — and with it, an immensely loved fast-food company — in the turmoil over marriage? \n It got caught up, amid fireworks and denunciations, due to the disappearance of once-commonly agreed-on standards of belief. Among those standards: respect for the free, peaceful working out of differences over fundamentals.\n FUNDAMENTALS, especially over the role of government in human life and society, never were quite as fundamental in America as we suppose in lionizing our forefathers. It took a war to settle the slavery question (which, according to some, still cries out for solution). Nevertheless, the basics of the Christian religion shaped character and society in ways that persist to the present. \n As Samuel Gregg writes in a new book, “Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization,” “Absent the vision of God articulated first by Judaism and then infused into the West’s marrow by Christianity, it’s harder to imagine developments like the de-legitimization of slavery or the de-deification of the state and the natural world.” \n The idea of a world with God in overall charge far exceeds any idea of a world deferential to crazy ideas of human omnipotence. The early United States had its faults, yes. Among these faults was not commitment to freedom as a way of taking away the freedoms of others. \n The founders were generally at one with the religious truths of the West, which harnessed reason and justice in ways nondependent on the lung power of some group or other, stuck on its desire to bully those otherwise persuaded into submission. The way of the founders was to talk things over, not to scream hysterically and partly shut down the Harvard-Yale game over disputed points concerning climate change. As for Chick-fil-A, the men and women of the founding era would say: Talk it over! See where right reason and a sense of the public good can be found!\n THEN THERE’S the impeachment uproar. The founders wouldn’t likely draw arresting comparisons between the presidential qualities of Trump and George Washington, but the principles they willed to their successors — reasonable argument near the top of the list — would, if invoked, get us through the gruesomeness, pointing the way, this week, to an extra drumstick. Do serve yourself, please, with the blessing of the many still thankful for this improbable nation’s improbable start.\n', created = 1575889335, expire = 1575975735, headers = '', serialized = 0 WHERE cid = '2:727b42452377cd9d1bc8a468f0e1a1ec' in /home/conserva/public_html/includes/cache.inc on line 112.
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user warning: Table './conserva_drupal/cache_filter' is marked as crashed and should be repaired query: UPDATE cache_filter SET data = '2020 ELECTION: November 8, 2019\n<img alt=\"\" src=\"http://conservativechronicle.com/sites/default/files/Murchison.gif\" style=\"width: 300px; height: 116px;\" />\nBeto O’Rourke’s pullout from the presidential race leaves the Democrats with, oh, a mere dozen and a half or so candidates available to run the country. The country’s corresponding task is to keep awake for the remainder of the race.\n THE PRESSING question is, or should be, what goes on here? What’s the mission — to can President Donald Trump or to move us in new, as yet hazy, directions? Or both at the same time? \n Beto — or to use his baptismal name, Robert Francis — typified the confusion. What was he trying to do? He’d lost, if narrowly, a senate race in Texas. He had no credentials to speak of. He just thought that even if an insufficient number of Texans liked him, he could charm a majority of Americans into loving him. \n That aspiration fizzled. He had nothing to say, apart from, “Give me your guns.” It was, evidently, what he said because so little else came to mind. \n I’m generally against kicking people when they’re down. I think a word about Beto’s departure may nonetheless have relevance, due to the jangling words it speaks about how we overvalue people whose purpose in life is to go around asking for votes. \n Beto won’t be missed. Candidates who come out of nowhere in order to lead us somewhere else are a dime a carload. As are the ideas with which they intend to galvanize us. In the 21st century, nothing’s good enough. Everything demands changing. \n Was I speaking to you, Sen. Elizabeth Warren? Ummm-hmmm. The No. 1 or No. 2 candidate in the Democratic race, depending on what poll results you rely on, has a plan — actually, a variety of plans — to turn life inside out. Her latest is a $20 trillion gig to throw us all off whatever health insurance we have, replacing it with a monolithic program of government health care — whether we want it or not. And, more important yet, whether the money is out there to do what she tells us to do. \n Oh, Lord, what else? Tom Steyer wants to spend billions of our dollars battling climate change and fixing energy infrastructure. Julian Castro will go on “being a voice for the voiceless,” according to his campaign manager. Andrew Yang wants to give us all a lot of money. Bernie wants to control everything — for our own good, naturally.\n NONE OF this has to do with the rocking-chair concerns of American voters: jobs, kids, schools, security, freedom and so on. No matter. This is presidential politics. If you want to be president, you must DO something for us. That we might be capable of doing things for ourselves, and our communities, is to the campaigners a weary assumption characteristic of a long-dead America. \n The candidates want to DO something. Something big. This is why they are there — to tell us what and how. Beto might have lasted longer had he excitingly engaged those larger Somethings we so conspicuously want. “Here’s how to maintain and strengthen social peace” — maybe something on that order. \n The great irony of these campaign trail excitements is how essentially boring and repetitious they are, carefully assembled with paste and cardboard for exhibition on the campaign trail. Democrats like to rail at capitalists. Here we get down to it. What’s all this free tuition, free health care, soak-the-rich, grab-the-guns stuff if not commercialism of the worst kind, meant to sell products — specifically the candidates themselves: Beto, Elizabeth, Joe, Bernie and so on. \n What all campaigners want is to sell at a profit. Donald’s ballyhoo just happens to be better tailored to human realities than, say, that of the senator from Massachusetts who wants our money so she can improve how it’s being spent. This is why, all else being equal, Donald is 2020’s likely winner and our president for four more years.\n BETO JUST thought the Something we wanted to hear was, “I’m coming for your guns.” Never mind. There’s lots more such stuff out there, e.g., “Get those hands up. I’m here for the money. And you’ll love what I’m going to do with it.”\n', created = 1575889335, expire = 1575975735, headers = '', serialized = 0 WHERE cid = '2:4ce28bd0205d8ff41adb178bc0d1ed42' in /home/conserva/public_html/includes/cache.inc on line 112.
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user warning: Table './conserva_drupal/cache_filter' is marked as crashed and should be repaired query: UPDATE cache_filter SET data = 'RELIGION: November 1, 2019\n<img alt=\"\" src=\"http://conservativechronicle.com/sites/default/files/Murchison.gif\" style=\"width: 300px; height: 116px;\" />\nSo, you’re surprised? Sorry not to join in the sentiment.\n OUR EYES and our instincts have noted silently the growing disappearance of religious commitment, as revealed in a new survey by the Pew Research Center. The famous “nones” — whose interest in religion approximates mine when it comes to superhero movies — are a quarter of the U. S. population, compared with 17% a decade ago. “The U.S.,” says Pew, “is steadily becoming less Christian and less religiously observant.” \n Which is a large statement, with various layers of meaning. A less Christian nation does not necessarily mean a less religious nation, maybe just one with more Buddhists, Moslems or shamans. Hardcore atheists are outnumbered by the merely indifferent: the don’t-care-one-way-or-another set. There’s also a sizable I’m-the-spiritual-type contingent out there, with inner feelings outranking creeds and doctrines. Very 21st century. We believe what we find believable, especially if it’s personal. \n Nicholas Kristof, in the New York Times, blames for this state of affairs “religious blowhards who have entangled faith with bigotry, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia.” Accepting that diagnosis would involve seeing Christianity’s role in life less as proclaiming Jesus’ Resurrection, Ascension and promised Second Coming and more as rearing on earth, with hands religious and hands secular, a palace of social justice and tolerance ... \n This could be the reason for Pew’s finding that fewer than half of American millennials identify as Christian. Equally it might reflect the longstanding tendency of the young to roll over in bed on Sunday after a hard-partying Saturday. \n Irony sidles delicately into the discussion at this point. \n It’s well known that 21st century Americans can’t stand one another. That would be, for various reasons, summed up in the distinctly nontheological name of President Donald Trump, who House Democrats appear determined to kick out of the White House on whatever pretext seems handy — the Ukraine, lies, abusive language, general nuttiness. \n What has the Trump furor got to do with Christianity’s seventh-inning slump? Notice that lying, deceiving, posturing and aggrandizing are moral — properly, immoral — behaviors disfavored, to say the least, by classical Christianity. The arraignment of Trump on moral grounds, which include disrespect for women, reminds us, or should remind us, that if you want to live in a generally moral society, you don’t want a generally secular society. You want a generally Christian society governed by, more or less, the writ of heaven.\n THE WRIT of Congress? Of the mainstream media? Of the Ivy League colleges? Phooey on such. No authority backs up secular pronouncements, which are matters of opinion, appearing in the mind as from half-remembered dreams. Maybe they’re right; maybe they’re wrong. The moral code is Christian, with accessions and looking-glass reflections from the natural law — the law written on the heart, as St. Paul put it. The moral law is forever old, updated here and there, but as familiar in essentials to citizens of the 21st century — those who notice it — as to their great-great-great-grandparents. The problem with those evangelicals whom Kristof maligns isn’t what they uphold; it is as often as not the spirit with which they uphold it: reprobatory as opposed to generous and loving. \n What if we had a moral climate comparable, say, to the one we had when Dwight Eisenhower was president? Would we be imputing to Ike the same offense Speaker Nancy Pelosi is hell-bent on ascribing to her adversary, Donald? I know better. You know better. \n The long and the short of it is that disparagement and neglect of Christian witness has been a key element in the moral descent of the society that chooses to despise and perhaps impeach Trump on, well, what grounds? Behaviors the present culture takes with only half-seriousness, inspired as often as not by the curse of any age, the quest for political power.\n THE DONALD, by most criteria, is no candidate for sainthood. But isn’t he exactly what an age more and more lacking in theological interests, less and less conversant with the moral law might be expected to raise up as a leader? ‘Pon my soul, that’s certainly the way it looks.\n William Murchison is writing a book on moral reconstruction in the 21st century. His latest book is “The Cost of Liberty: The Life of John Dickinson.”\n', created = 1575889335, expire = 1575975735, headers = '', serialized = 0 WHERE cid = '2:5f3da4af63280206600f5a15eccf9ef4' in /home/conserva/public_html/includes/cache.inc on line 112.
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user warning: Table './conserva_drupal/cache_filter' is marked as crashed and should be repaired query: UPDATE cache_filter SET data = 'BERNIE SANDERS: October 21, 2019\n<img alt=\"\" src=\"http://conservativechronicle.com/sites/default/files/Murchison.gif\" />\nA New York Times opinion column acquaints humanity with the injustice of forbidding the vote to 16- and 17-year-olds — who, nevertheless, would gain the franchise once a budding movement to that end came to fruition and then would impose the superior wisdom of the young by handing the presidency, so we are entitled to infer, to Sen. Bernie Sanders.\n THE WELL-RIPENED alliance between various young folks and snowy-haired Sanders — a 78-year-old heart attack victim going on age 5, to judge by his simplistic politics — is hard to sort out. The truth seems to be that old-time political alignments — e.g., Democratic populists against Republican country club types — no longer hold. Nobody seems happy, not even the young, once famous for generally ignoring politics in behalf of more sensible activities, such as homecomings and the new car styles. \n That would explain the Republican split over President Donald Trump as well as the defection of working-class Democrats to the Republican ticket. It would help explain — though nothing can completely explain, amid breathtaking prosperity — the progressive passion for robbing selected Peter to pay collective Paul. \n Americans know what they want, politically speaking, whether or not they know why they want it or whether getting it would make them happier. \n Well, it’s odd. It did not used to be that way. Bernie and I both recall, as Joe Biden must also, the four-sided 1948 presidential election: Truman versus Dewey versus Thurmond versus Wallace. But that stuff was mostly our parents’ affair. The Capitol and the White House, not to mention the Supreme Court building, seemed — and were — distant from us. \n The media, I think — evermore numerous, evermore talkative — changed our minds, as did the growing number of initiatives overseen by those vested with power. The ordinary man or woman of politics, it becomes increasingly clear, is going to solve all your problems. You only have to identify which problems you want solved.\n FAITH IN all these goings-on doubled or tripled. Now it’s life itself. Which is why, Astra Taylor, social activist and author of the above-referenced New York Times opinion piece, argues, “Everything, it seems, is up for grabs ... A hoary establishment” — thank you, ma’am, I would say, speaking as one of the hoares — “hoards influence, curtailing young people’s ability to effect change.” \n It makes you want to go on living to continue outnumbering for as long as possible and, let’s hope, outvoting the Sanders contingent, determined as it seems to turn life inside out through taxing billionaires out of existence. \n Sanders is flesh-and-blood proof that to have lived long is not necessarily to understand the rationale for age-related voting restrictions. Living long should entail the gift of looking around and weighing which ideas and policies make sense in the real world and which don’t. Bernie, at 78, isn’t on to it, but he hardly seems to notice. That’s no argument for increasing the electoral heft of “the kids,” as we used to call their forebears, the baby boomers, back when they, too, demanded the right to change America. \n There used to be a virtue called patience. Rightly exercised, it took note of reality. Nobody knew everything, and certainly not off the bat — the result of hearing a speech or taking part in a rally. Relax, take a deep breath; that was supposed to be the ticket. Look around; see how this idea or that one works out; don’t embrace the first notion that pops into your head. It might be OK; it might not.\n THE INSTANT Gratification Society — our own society — wants everything now. This very minute. Whether it works or not. No wonder Bernie draws the young and the restless into his circle; good ol’ Promise ‘Em Anything Bernie, who — has this thought struck his acolytes? —likely won’t be around when the bill for “Medicare for All” is due. We all know many who will be. There is satisfaction, if only a little, in visualizing their awakening to the fraught understanding that patience might be the virtue the old jerks who formerly ran things said it was. \n   \n', created = 1575889335, expire = 1575975735, headers = '', serialized = 0 WHERE cid = '2:2545a6a7c660adee4fdfbaadb10dff0e' in /home/conserva/public_html/includes/cache.inc on line 112.
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user warning: Table './conserva_drupal/cache_filter' is marked as crashed and should be repaired query: UPDATE cache_filter SET data = 'RELIGION: October 16, 2019\n<img alt=\"\" src=\"http://conservativechronicle.com/sites/default/files/Murchison.gif\" style=\"width: 300px; height: 116px;\" />\nAt its best, Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke’s high-octane assault on religious freedom calls for brandy and an extended lie-down in a dark room. That’s the best that can be said of it. Its worst has to do with the disdain a midlevel presidential candidate exhibits for supernatural religion.\n THAT’S IF he really meant what he affirmed at a CNN town hall about stripping federal tax exemption from churches that are profoundly serious about the need for long-honored moral arrangements (e.g., two-sex marriage) that are now being heatedly contested. \n You never really know about seekers of high office, who, as a class, are given to saying all sorts of things. We may hope O’Rourke, the ex-El Paso congressman, having failed to light up the sky with national excitement over his presidential prospects, was just popping firecrackers, hoping to get noticed. \n Noticed he got, and not in a nice way. It appeared to Christians of a more conservative disposition than O’Rourke’s that the candidate was urging punishment of religious Americans opposed to the same-sex marriage agenda. Said Kelly Shackelford, whose First Liberty Institute defends in court the right to religious freedom, “Beto O’Rourke’s threat is a direct affront to the constitutional guarantee of religious liberty.” \n A surprised O’Rourke sought to explain. Why, it wasn’t religious liberty he wanted to restrict. It was the discriminatory actions and activities that followed no-longer-favored religious teachings. Under the Beto program, you could believe anything you liked (however bigoted and backward) about the new dispensation of LGBTQ issues and rights. Just don’t try doing anything about it at taxpayer expense! The Beto program holds that public policy trumps religious belief. Watch it, Reverend. \n O’Rourke’s chances for the Democratic nomination, never compelling to begin with, partly in view of his sparse credentials, cannot have been strengthened by this calculated outburst, the fundamental meaning of which makes no sense. The irrelevance of religion to the human condition, and specifically to the interests of a free people, is the point that underlies the O’Rourkian rhetoric.\n RELIGIOUS PEOPLE, O’Rourke is saying, couldn’t possibly have anything worth hearing on a public question absolutely clear to Robert Francis O’Rourke. We don’t need these folk, it would seem. It’s bad enough to have ‘em around in the first place. We sure as the world don’t need to accord them a tax exemption for their unprogressive thoughts and ideas. \n The American tradition, as many still remember, is a tradition that welcomes religious insight. Why, if not, would we gratify our religious institutions with exemption from federal taxes? We do so because, without restricting religious expression to one species, one creed or one formulation, we view connection with the spiritual world as valuable to the secular world. \n We think of God as a significant player in human affairs. Did he create man and woman? He might, in that event, have useful thoughts on the mission of man and woman, and their relationship to each other. If so, there would seem to be the need to hear him out — even to act upon his ideas. So the founders certainly thought. The men who made America — George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, Patrick Henry and so on down the line — made room in its institutions and civil guarantees for whatever obligations and responsibilities God might lay upon the people of America. \n Beto — an odd name and presence to introduce in the midst of a conversation about such figures — seems to believe political institutions in a land of liberty need no counsel about religious notions unsubjected to inspection by the Supreme Court or Congress. A President O’Rourke, if we were to have one, could doubtless carry on just fine without spiritual analyses. \n Maybe he could, the nation having undergone vast changes in the past half-century or so: no prayers in schools, no constraints against the taking of unborn life, no preferences for moral teachings knocked down by the courts and disfavored by the media.\n A LIVELY question is: Does O’Rourke know modern America better than modern America knows itself? Perhaps we’ll find out soon. That is, after all, what elections are about, in part: finding out the worst as well as the best and making you wonder what on God’s green earth could have happened to God’s green earth.\n', created = 1575889335, expire = 1575975735, headers = '', serialized = 0 WHERE cid = '2:b19ded84fd00e2f305867358f2c00fd9' in /home/conserva/public_html/includes/cache.inc on line 112.
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William Murchison

12/04/2019 - 6:18pm

William Murchison

TRUTH: December 3, 2019 The Anglican Church of Canada clutches its throat at the prospect of — Lord have mercy — shutting down its ministries and works 20 years from now. You know — putting up the “Closed” sign, the public demand for said ministries dwindling more with every passing year. So sharply have Anglican membership rolls declined since 2000 that, according...

Of impeachers and extra drumsticks

By: William Murchison 12/01/2019 - 8:40pm

THANKSGIVING: November 29, 2019 Beyond the impeachment mess surrounding President Donald Trump, which is due to be settled one of these days — I think in Trump’s favor, but what do I know? — beyond the impeachment mess, I was starting to declare, sprawls before us ... what, exactly? More messes of similarly degrading character...

And I solemnly promise you

By: William Murchison 11/11/2019 - 11:41pm

2020 ELECTION: November 8, 2019 Beto O’Rourke’s pullout from the presidential race leaves the Democrats with, oh, a mere dozen and a half or so candidates available to run the country. The country’s corresponding task is to keep awake for the remainder of the race. THE PRESSING question is, or should be, what goes on here? What...

The church and Donald Trump

By: William Murchison 11/03/2019 - 8:32pm

RELIGION: November 1, 2019 So, you’re surprised? Sorry not to join in the sentiment. OUR EYES and our instincts have noted silently the growing disappearance of religious commitment, as revealed in a new survey by the Pew Research Center. The famous “nones” — whose interest in religion approximates mine when it comes to...

The young, the restless and Bernie

By: William Murchison 10/22/2019 - 9:19pm

BERNIE SANDERS: October 21, 2019 A New York Times opinion column acquaints humanity with the injustice of forbidding the vote to 16- and 17-year-olds — who, nevertheless, would gain the franchise once a budding movement to that end came to fruition and then would impose the superior wisdom of the young by handing the presidency, so we are...

What in Heaven’s name is going on?

By: William Murchison 10/18/2019 - 7:10pm

RELIGION: October 16, 2019 At its best, Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke’s high-octane assault on religious freedom calls for brandy and an extended lie-down in a dark room. That’s the best that can be said of it. Its worst has to do with the disdain a midlevel presidential candidate exhibits for supernatural religion...

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