Ross Douthat

Every President's early months in office are shaped by circumstances and policies inherited from his predecessor. But few presidencies have enjoyed opening acts in which the previous administration loomed as large as the Bush record has in the first three months of the Obama era. Every time a media organization promises a summing-up of "Barack Obama's First One Hundred Days," the headline should have an asterisk attached: *Brought To You By George W. Bush.Neophyte… More »

This has been my last week at The Atlantic. The magazine has been my home for seven years, under four editors, permanent and interim: The late Michael Kelly; Cullen Murphy, Scott Stossel and now James Bennet. When I joined up, in the fall of 2002, it was as a researcher in the D.C. office, but the magazine as a whole was still based in Boston, in a gorgeous North End building - a former tannery, I think, with creaking floors and exposed brick, pools of shadow and a… More »

They resemble nothing so much as the anti-war protests during Bush's first term. The claim that they don't have an organizing premise strikes me as obviously wrong: They're anti-bailout, anti-stimulus, anti-deficit, and anti- the tax increases that will eventually be required to pay for the current spending spree, and complaining that they don't also have a ten-point plan for reforming Medicare and Social Security reflects a misunderstanding of the nature of… More »

Damon Linker, in a much-commented-on post on our possibly post-Christian future:What will provide the theological content of the nation's civil religion now that the "mere orthodoxy" of the evangelical-Catholic alliance has proven unsuitable for a pluralistic nation of 300 million people? To my mind, the most likely and salutary option is moralistic therapeutic deism. Here is the core of its (Rousseauian) catechism, in the words of sociologist Christian Smith:1. "A… More »

Make no mistake: if he rose at all.It was as His body;If the cell's dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit,The amino acids rekindle,The Church will fall.It was not as the flowers,Each soft spring recurrent;It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the.Eleven apostles;It was as His flesh; ours.The same hinged thumbs and toes.The same valved heart.That--pierced--died, withered, paused, and then regathered.Out of enduring Might.New… More »

The wounded surgeon plies the steel. That questions the distempered part; Beneath the bleeding hands we feel. The sharp compassion of the healer's art. Resolving the enigma of the fever chart. Our only health is the disease. If we obey the dying nurse. Whose constant care is not to please. But to remind us of our, and Adam's curse, And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse. The whole earth is our hospital. Endowed by the ruined millionaire, Wherein,… More »

Terry Eagleton:... for Christian teaching, God's love and forgiveness are ruthlessly unforgiving powers which break violently into our protective, self-rationalizing little sphere, smashing our sentimental illusions and turning our world brutally upside down. In Jesus, the law is revealed to be the law of love and mercy, and God not some Blakean Nobodaddy but a helpless, vulnerable animal. It is the flayed and bloody scapegoat of Calvary that is now the true… More »

Rene Girard:Beginning with the story of Cain and Abel, the Bible proclaims the innocence of mythical victims and the guilt of their victimizers. Living after the widespread promulgation of the gospel, we find this natural and never pause to think that in classical myths the opposite is true: the persecutors always seem to have a valid cause to persecute their victims. The Dionysiac myths regard even the most horrible lynchings as legitimate. Pentheus in the… More »

Joshua Land revisits The Passion and The Last Temptation of Christ.Ben Witherington offers a detailed critique (with more to come) of Bart Ehrman's Jesus, Interrupted.The gang at GetReligion wrestles with the Newsweek-announced end (or lack thereof) of Christian America.Via dotCommonweal, a look at Leonardo's Last Supper in its original context - as sacred art for a dining room.And in anticipation of tomorrow, the first chapter from Richard John Neuhaus's Death on… More »

Michelle Goldberg, explaining why liberals should care about demographic decline: ... it's tempting to dismiss concerns about demographic decline as an anti-feminist race panic. The thing is, though, rapidly declining birth rates really are a problem, especially for the sort of generous welfare states that liberals love ... I get why liberals have shied away from this discussion, since there's so many uncomfortable issues involved. But they really shouldn't,… More »

I take second place to no one in my admiration for James Wood. But I'm looking forward to the day when we're deep enough into Barack Obama's Glorious Restoration of American DemocracyTM that I can read a fine Wood essay on George Orwell without encountering a passage like this:If his novelistic imagining of totalitarian horror now looks a bit dated, it is partly because his fiction provided the dusty epitaph on a dusty tombstone that he himself helped to carved;… More »

It probably goes without saying, but I thought The Weekly Standard's take on the GOP alterna-budget was more or less spot-on. More »

Reihan on health-care reform; Bruce Bartlett on tax reform.Alan Jacobs on Philip Pullman, pro-death apologist.Seed Magazine on Christians and the multiverse.Jeremy Beer on Newt's conversion.Philip Blond on the "Red Tory" moment.Adam Kirsch on literature at the end of history. More »

Jonah writes:Just something to ponder. For a couple years now, there's been a growing chorus of pundits, analysts and -- most significantly -- conservative reformers who've claimed to one degree or another that the GOPs anti-tax posture has lost its political salience. There are good arguments on that score, and bad ones. But it seems to me that the tax issue is on its way back. And while nothing is certain, I think it's reasonable to argue that the obituaries for… More »

Rod Dreher took note of this a little while ago, and over the weekend Kathleen Parker based a column around an interview with Ahmanson, a big-time GOP fundraiser and social conservative who's decided to re-register as a Democrat out of frustration with the California GOP. Ahmanson is a quirky figure, to put it mildly, and you don't want to read too much into his registration flip. But like Obama's surprising gains among traditionalist Catholics, it suggests that my… More »

There's nothing terribly unexpected in Nicholas Eberstadt's essay on Russia's demographic decline, but his analysis provides useful background for both the debate over birth rates and the debate over America's Russia policy. To wit:Strikingly, and perhaps paradoxically, Moscow's leadership is advancing into this uncertain terrain not only with insouciance but with highly ambitious goals. In late 2007, for example, the Kremlin outlined the objective of achieving and… More »

Ezra Klein, on Paul Ryan's alternative budget:It's not what you do when you're responsible for running the government. It's what you propose when you're responsible for running the messaging.I understand what he's getting at, but this phrasing makes it sound like the House Republicans' budget is an exercise in cynicism and partisan political calculation - which is exactly the wrong way to look at what's going on with the House GOP. Sure, there may be some cynicism… More »

From Jeffrey Goldberg's much-discussed interview with Benjamin Netanyahu:"Since the dawn of the nuclear age, we have not had a fanatic regime that might put its zealotry above its self-interest. People say that they'll behave like any other nuclear power. Can you take the risk? Can you assume that?"To which Alex Massie responds:It's not a nice risk to take, but it is one we've taken before. Once upon a time plenty of people talked about the Soviet Union in this way… More »

There may be a slight element of Western wishful thinking in this analysis, but as a backgrounder to the first Medvedev-Obama encounter (and the apparent back-and-forth between Moscow and the White House), it makes for interesting reading. More »

Yglesias wonders, in the context of the Georgian Patriarch's pro-natalist baptism policy:Less clear to me is why so many people seem concerned by the specter of low birth rates. Historically, low levels of population are associated with high average living standards. That should be less true in the modern world where we're not as dependent on agriculture for our economic activity. But the logic hasn't completely vanished. If there were dramatically fewer people in… More »