In his New York Times column this week, Peter Steinfels has an insightful analysis of an intriguing and provocative new book by C. John Sommerville, The Decline of the Secular University.

Read more on Secular Universities in Decline?…

The Super MoneyMaker Pressure Pump

No, we’re not talking about Elmore James’ Blues hit covered by the likes of George Thorogood, Fleetwood Mac and The Black Crowes nor its racy subject matter.

Read more on Seek Dignity? Then, “You Gotta Shake Your MoneyMaker”…

Hunter Baker, blogging at his new home on the American Spectator Blog (recently added to our blogroll), responds to a post by James G. Poulos, which emphasizes President Bush’s “proposed emphasis on math and science education, to the patent detriment of the humanities.”

Read more on Federal Funding for the Humanities…

An article in yesterday’s NYT, “Saving the World, One Video Game at a Time,” by Clive Thompson, gives a good overview of the current trend in the video game industry, especially by nonprofits and activist groups, to create “serious games,” a movement which “has some serious brain power behind it. It is a partnership between advocates and nonprofit groups that are searching for new ways to reach young people, and tech-savvy academics keen to explore video games’ educational potential.”

Read more on Taking Games Seriously…

Juliet Eilperin, “Bush Pollution Curbs Are Rated Equal to Clinton’s: Science Panel Says Proposed Cap-and-Trade System Will Help Clean Air,” Washington Post, July 24, 2006:

The report from the National Academy of Sciences, released yesterday, represents the latest effort to assess how best to reduce air pollution estimated to cause as many as 24,000 premature deaths each year. The panel concluded that an earlier Bush plan would have allowed pollution to increase over a dozen years, but it found that the administration’s more recent Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR) — which targets emissions from power plants in 22 states and the District of Columbia — would help clean the air over the next two decades.

Read more on Environmental News Roundup…

If the most common Protestant objection to natural law revolves around sin, as we saw in Part 5, we should now address the second most common objection that natural law is a rival to God and Scripture.

Read more on Protestants and Natural Law, Part 6…

After ruminating earlier this week about foreign policy and just war, I asked a series of interrelated questions yesterday about just war.

Prof. Bainbridge was kind enough to respond, and offered the critically important distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello, that is, justness up to war and justness in war. This gets at the difference between justification for the cause or occasion for war, causus belli, and the way in which that war is conducted.

Read more on Answers to Just War Questions…

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about just war, I’m passing along this TCS Daily piece by Prof. Bainbridge, “Just War for the Sake of Argument” (it’s also discussed at The Remedy and Bainbridge’s own blog).

Read more on How Just Must a Just War Be?…

“…can one build something lasting if the goal is not truth, but power? The few, most penetrating minds of that time understood that what constitutes the sickness of contemporary culture is the repudiation of truth for the sake of action…”
Czeslaw Milosz, 1942

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In this week’s commentary, “Transcendence and Obsolescence: The Responsible Stewardship of Oil,” I ask the question: “Why did God create oil?” I raise the question within the context of debates about global warming and the burning of fossil fuels, including Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth and the work of the Evangelical Climate Initiative.

Read more on Transcendence and Obsolescence: The Responsible Stewardship of Oil…