OPINION

12/19/2009

Rod Dreher: What these old walls have seen
Everybody wants their house to be homey, but that's hard to get with a big house. What we gave up in size, we made up for in character. There's a reason why people with much larger and more modern houses than ours love gathering in our cottage.

12/11/2009

Rod Dreher: GLSEN's toxic reading list eroticizes children
Decent people are appalled by instances of gay children subjected to abuse or torment. But what GLSEN does is mouth slogans about the (laudable) need to stop anti-gay bullying as a pretext for sexualizing schoolchildren.

12/04/2009

Rod Dreher: Abby Johnson is my Texan of the Year
The former director of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Bryan, who walked out the door and joined the pro-life protesters outside on the sidewalk, sacrificed much to bear witness to the truth about abortion.

11/25/2009

Rod Dreher: You have your opinion; they have theirs
Whether they realize it, ordinary people have become more comfortable with the idea that truth is relative and that emotion is a reliable and sufficient guide to finding it. For many of us, what's true is whatever is pleasing and useful.

11/13/2009

Rod Dreher: Will we ever wake up to Islamic radical threat?
Don't jump to conclusions about Islam's role in the Fort Hood massacre, the media warned. Who needed to jump? From almost the beginning, it was clear that Maj. Nidal Hasan was a homegrown jihadi.

11/06/2009

Rod Dreher: On gay marriage, empathy is a two-way street
Leaving aside that there are undoubtedly people who vote against gay marriage because they flat-out don't like gay people, there are serious and important reasons to vote against same-sex marriage – and these deserve to be taken seriously.

10/30/2009

Rod Dreher: Christmas and the wealth of 'Tinsel'
We may just be celebrating Halloween, but I know it's not too early to wish you a merry Christmas, because the shopping mall told me so. The book you need to read to get ready for the season is Hank Stuever's lively "Tinsel," which examines what Christmas means to contemporary Americans through the eyes of three families in Frisco.

10/26/2009

Rod Dreher: Willingham case a test of Perry's character
So far, it's been an epic fail for the governor. And if Texans let him get away with this brazen attempt to evade responsibility, we'll be party to a grave moral failure.

10/16/2009

Rod Dreher: Yeah, I'm mad. Rattle and hum but no music.
Is the new Cowboys Stadium a thing of awesome beauty? No question. But as far as this angry U2 fan is concerned, the earth can open up and swallow the whole thing. After Monday's concert introduction, believe me, there won't be a second date.

10/09/2009

Rod Dreher: Of Roman Polanski, rationalization and prophets
Not that I'm excusing it, but the revolting stance Hollywood has taken in defense of child-raping filmmaker Roman Polanski is understandable as evidence of human frailty. It's in our nature to take the side of our own kind, rationalizing and spinning despite compelling evidence that they behaved like monsters.

09/26/2009

Rod Dreher: Glenn Beck's world order endangers the right
Glenn Beck is a white Jeremiah Wright, a crazy-pants conspiracy theorist whose worldview is rooted in the paranoid teachings of a far-right Mormon. Conservative Becketeers had better think long and hard about where their affable leader is taking them.

09/11/2009

Rod Dreher: Zombie conservatives at the schoolhouse door
conservatism is not dead. Rather, it's undead. The conservative movement is herking and jerking like a zombie, dedicated to little more than frenetic gestures execrating Obama, and to regaining power. To what end?

09/03/2009

Rod Dreher: Seay doesn't like the GOP he's seeing
George Seay doesn't have much to say about the upcoming U.S. Senate race, but it doesn't take much prodding to get the energetic reform Republican to talk about the shake-up he believes his party desperately needs.

08/28/2009

Rod Dreher: Health care and personal responsibility
Here's a health care reform plan all of us could do, starting right now: lose weight and get in shape. We are a nation of fatties. About two-thirds of all American adults are overweight, says the government, and about half that number qualifies as obese.

08/27/2009

Rod Dreher: Ted Kennedy as Don Draper
Had Ted Kennedy been ad man instead of politician, he could have been a rising young executive at the Sterling Cooper agency of "Mad Men" fame, tutored in the ways of the era's elite masculine culture.

08/21/2009

Rod Dreher: Whole Foods and its wholly foolish boycotters
Whole Foods is almost by definition a lifestyle-left company, but the unhinged left is organizing a boycott, furious that the company CEO wrote an op-ed opposing government-run health care and offering his own ideas for reform. That's all it took.

08/14/2009

Rod Dreher: Against atheist fundamentalism
Most atheists I know don't care for religion, obviously, but aren't angry about it. Not so the True Unbelievers – the Richard Dawkinses and their followers – who prove that you don't have to be religious to be a fundamentalist.

05/29/2009

Rod Dreher: The soft bigotry of high expectations
Matthew B. Crawford, in his brilliant "Shop Class as Soul Craft," understands the protection that tradesmen have in the global market. "If you need a deck built, or your car fixed, the Chinese are of no help," he writes. "Because they are in China."

05/22/2009

Rod Dreher: What I wish they'd told me at graduation
The bad news, high school graduates, is that you can't have it all. You aren't as free as you think you are. Sorry, but no matter what optimistic flapdoodle your commencement speaker tells you, that's the truth.

05/15/2009

Rod Dreher: Truth, culture and cognition
Why should we, in the modern West, confidently presume that we have the completely correct way of discerning truth? Many assume that scientific materialism is the only legitimate epistemology. Religion, to them, is nothing but a vile illusion.

05/08/2009

Rod Dreher: Dispiriting dog days in Dallas
What does it say about Dallas that its leadership class gets giddy over grandiose projects, but can't be bothered to tackle the chronic dog problem? Maybe if somebody would propose a Calatrava dog pound, city government might start to care.

05/01/2009

Rod Dreher: Torture, truth and consequences
We don't need laws to protect us when it's easy to do the right thing. We need them to restrain us when we're in the grip of some destructive passion that tells us we can achieve a good end if only we turn our back on what is right.

04/17/2009

Rod Dreher: Susan Boyle's redemption song
Two female entertainers made headlines last week, separated by nine years, one ocean and a moral universe. Consider the lives of Marilyn Chambers, who had everything, and Susan Boyle, who had nothing – and what they did with what that.

04/10/2009

Rod Dreher: What Austin can teach bigger Dallas
Austin doesn't have any of the big, showcase starchitecture projects that Dallas has and Dallas craves. What Austin boasts is a culture that cherishes the back-pocket, everyday things that make life pleasant.

04/03/2009

Rod Dreher: Secular liberalism as consensus
The broad liberal view is the consensus in American establishment, a social and political fact that conceals – especially from liberals – how much power liberalism exercises in determining not only the parameters of discussion but also the outcome.

03/20/2009

Rod Dreher: Food safety shouldn't kill farmers markets
Well-meaning government food-safety regulation may mean the possible death of farmers markets and the local farm movement and the further consolidation of U.S. food production in the hands of big business. It's that serious.

03/13/2009

Rod Dreher: When the repairman turns radical
Dave, I should mention, is a middle-aged white guy who lives in southwest Dallas, well informed and by no means a talk-radio crank. If you were to say he had no respect for the leadership class in Dallas, you would be correct. But it doesn't stop there.

03/06/2009

Rod Dreher: Rush Limbaugh, inflexible and unhelpful
No wonder these people had no idea that Bobby Jindal's speech was going to bomb. Like long-lost Japanese soldiers hiding out in jungle dens, they really don't grasp that the world has changed and that conservatism must change with it.

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