Thanks to Rachel Kriger for this guest post, one of a regular monthly series. Rachel was raised on organic food and in Jewish day school. At Wesleyan University, she studied religion and sociology, and then found the most practical career to combine the two as an organic farming apprentice. In the A...

Ian Austin and Linda Waltho, the two MPs whose West Midlands constituencies cover the area where Frank Foley lived until his death in 1958, have set up the annual Frank Foley lecture. If you don't know who Frank Foley was, then you should and you will if you read this post. This is the Inaugural Fra...

Hello everyone!  Here's our update for Thursday, September 18, 2008.   The store was packed for our ANNIVERSARY PARTY last Friday.  Thanks to everyone who came by for pizza, cake, and prizes.  You helped usher in our sixth birthday in style. This week we have our usual secti...

I was in England the last time a Republican candidate threw red meat this raw and bloody to the Conservative Right. It was the summer of 1988. George H.W. Bush had looked too liberal to the evangelical wing of the party. He had to do something to let them KNOW he was a conservative. So he chose Dan ...

The looming failure of Benedict XVI’s pontificate is seen in the closeness of his association with two very suspect politicians, Silvio Berlusconi and George Bush, and also in the fact that the most vocal enthusiasm is coming from the extreme right of the Catholic Church.   Berlusconi declare...

Eugene Volokh thinks that the major dispute between the majority opinion and the dissenting opinion, in the Texas Supreme Court decision on the FLDS community, concerns definition of "household". The appellate court held, and the majority Supreme Court opinion agreed, that the FLDS communi...

Dharma in the Dirt It comes with a slideshow AS a proudly Birkenstocked Zen gardener, Wendy Johnson can mindfully muster up affection for many of the earth’s species, with the possible exception of persimmon-devouring gophers. But poison hemlock holds a special place in her heart. Without the pres...

Well, my loyal readers, the weather’s heating up. You know what that means: that’s right…love is in the air. Wedding season is upon us so you best be prepared for it, Israeli-style. I had the privilege of attending a couple of weddings recently which gave me an up-close-and-personal look at ma...

The NBC & ABC scheduling battle continues.. to be hilarious. It all started when ABC scheduled their last pre-strike episode of Grey's Anatomy opposite NBC's premiere of The Celebrity Apprentice on January 3rd. Once they did that, NBC moved Apprentice to the following week, January 10th. ABC followe...

A Christmas sermon, adapted from my book, The Road to Heaven: a Traveler’s Guide to Life’s Narrow Way: “Isn’t there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about?� So asks a despondent Charlie Brown at the beginning of one of the most famous scenes in the history of television holiday speci...