Commenter Jaime A. Headden writes: So, Jason, let’s try and consider what taking “marriage� off the books and simply replacing that term with another less loaded one? What do you think would happen, as a thought experiment? I hate to do this, but I feel like I have to restate the question in a...

Put that book on my reading list! Nicholas Wolterstorff “is the Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical Theology at Yale University and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,” and his new book from Princeton University Press will probably make about as serious an ...

Responding to a proposed compromise on the national marriage debate by Jonathan Rauch and David Blankenhorn, Ryan T. Anderson and Sherif Girgis of the socially conservative Witherspoon Institute suggest a different compromise: [U]nions recognized by the federal government would be available to any t...

I’ve never heard of Daryl Hart, Residence in Scholar, Intercollegiate Studies Institute before listening to the address he gave to the Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy, housed in the Department of Government at Georgetown University, here. Also giving addresses in that foru...

Not exclusively for the locals, I guess, because there are some links to some fun audio. A few quick notes on events and news that has crossed my transom: The SPARK Festival kicks off at the Belfry this week. I’m hoping to attend a reading of Joan MacLeod’s (man, no Wikipedia page, that&...

I can’t think of another time it would occur to me to link Ronald Bailey, Nat Hentoff and Christopher Hitchens, but as Michael C. Moynahan notes today at Reason’s “Hit & Run,” they (and now Moynahan) are practically the only working journalists to have reported on U.N. R...

At American Creation my friend Tom Van Dyke points to the learned Joseph Story’s commentaries on the Constitution and religion. To his credit, Van Dyke gives us a long excerpt from Story, so we can read it in context. You can read the original here. Included in the longer except is the quotati...

That was the title of one of Andrew Sullivan’s recent posts warning against the extremes of secularism. Yet, many of us are also wary of the extremes of sectarian religious politics (of the “Christian” or “Judeo-Christian” sort). I endorse a softer secularism. And if it...

This post focuses on the notion oft-repeated in Founding era political pulpits that the Ancient Israelites had a “republic.” The Biblical record does not teach this. Such a notion is wholly a product of Enlightenment rationalism, not of historic orthodox biblical Christianity. And that&#...

One concern about liberaltarianism is that libertarians will lose something important in the process. I’m not convinced that this is a very pressing concern. After all, liberaltarianism is a project that exists mostly in a few blog posts at the moment. It’s nothing like a voting strategy...