Some weeks back, Joshua noted that the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (LCMS) shut down its long-running and well-regarded radio program, Issues, Etc., in what appeared to be a fit of denominational politics. Fans, Lutheran and not, were outraged and launched protests and petitions trying to get the...

Evansville, Indiana attorney John Clouse died on Thursday at the age of 82. His biography contains plenty of things for eulogizers to touch upon: he bravely fought in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, and he was widely considered one of the region’s more formidable trial lawyers. But his...

Today the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, struck down Washington, D.C.’s draconian gun ban. Passed in 1976, the law prohibited private citizens from owning handguns and required rifle and shotgun owners to keep their weapons disassembled and locked away. Justice Scalia wrote the decision for...

On this date, June 25, in 1530, the Lutheran reformers presented the Augsburg Confession to Charles V at the Diet of Augsburg. Written by Philipp Melanchthon (but given a thumbs up by Luther) it was the first statement of faith by the Evangelicals, stating both the reformers’ beliefs and their...

The most recent edition of The Economist carries an interesting article on the so-called “endowment effect”. The basis of the endowment effect won’t be surprising to many of you: once someone owns or is endowed with something, he places a higher value on it than he did when he acquired...

Here’s a bumper sticker I’d like to see: “We are the proud parents of a child whose self-esteem is sufficient that he doesn’t need us promoting his minor scholastic achievements on the back of our car.“ -The late George Carlin (via Jason Boyett). RIP

Camille Paglia two weeks ago: [C]onservative talk radio, which I have been following with interest for almost 20 years, has become a tornado alley of hallucinatory holograms of Obama. He’s a Marxist! A radical leftist! A hater of America! He’s “not that bright”; he can’t...

On Father’s Day Barack Obama delivered a stirring speech on fatherhood, and in particular on the need to strengthen families through more committed fathers. Here’s a brief sample: Of all the rocks upon which we build our lives, we are reminded today that family is the most important. And...

Check out The Living Room Candidate. Even better than the political bumper sticker archive, here you can find presidential campaign commercials from 1952-2004. The funny, the creepy, the lame — they’re all there.

This is the kind of thing that makes me love science. Derek Lowe has a blog entry about a letter in Nature whose authors figured out a way to determine the number and age of all the fat cells in a person’s body, and tracked that data over a number of years. The results confirm that the number...