Be sure to watch Larry King Live tonight to be scared out of your wits. Or don’t. I won’t.

Why are Catholic churches in the U.S. so different from those in other countries and the movies? Aren’t they supposed to be open twenty-four hours so you can pray and commune with God any time you need to?
I mention this because after work I decided, rather than go have a couple of drinks before seeing […]

I knew there was a reason I bitched every day for a year and a half until my family left Alabama and moved to Texas:
With the state’s weather forecasters not delivering much-needed rain, Gov. Bob Riley on Thursday turned to a higher power. The governor issued a proclamation calling for a week of prayer for […]

Excellent New Yorker journalist George Packer writes an insightful post about his visit to the new Creation Museum in Kentucky:
The simulation serves a primitive ideology known as “young-earth creationism,” which promote the idea that the earth is just over six thousand years old and that the fossil record appeared after the Flood, around 4300 B.C. […]

The Vatican has issued the Ten Commandments of driving:
Thou shall not drive under the influence of alcohol. Thou shall respect speed limits. Thou shall not consider a car an object of personal glorification or use it as a place of sin.
The Vatican took a break from strictly theological matters on Tuesday to issue its own […]

Abu Aardvark has a thought-provoking post about jihadi’s use of the Internet for more than just recruitment and training. They use its ability to facilitate communications over wide ranges to define their larger ideas, values and strategies. As is often noted, they use the technology of the present to push for a return to the […]

War Is Boring reports that with the fall of the Taliban, who — surprise! — executed gays, in Afghanistan, the gay community has exploded (if not in numbers then at least in visibility). In fact, the Afghani equivalent of gay marriage is also occurring.
. . . [N]ow the Taliban are gone and the Afghan gays […]

Interesting article in today’s The American Prospect online. A new study says the more secular residents there are in a neighborhood, the more conservative their religious neighbors become.
Let’s say you’re a progressive who isn’t religious, and you aren’t afraid to say so. You’ve long since cast off the beliefs your parents held, and you never […]

Oh, I love it when The Economist gets snarky.
This story about the increase in hostilities between the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers is from the current issue:
Those nationalists — led by a bigoted Buddhist clergy, whose small but shrill political party shares power with Mr Rajapakse’s Sri Lanka Freedom Party — considered the […]