The nonsense continues. So there’s no point in ceasing to talk about it, not yet at least. (And I daresay we can be pretty confident that the nonsense won’t stop, it never does.)

There is this string of absurdities for example.

In a departure from past practice, a Dec. 27 Dean campaign event opened with a prayer from a minister. That same day, Dean told voters, “I think religion is important and spiritual values are very important, which is what this election is really about.” The faith-friendly tone follows a December cover story, “Howard Dean’s Religion Problem,” in The New Republic magazine. The article called Dean “one of the most secular candidates to run for president in modern history.” It

Well, that was exciting! In a terrifying sort of way. I get on the computer only to find B&W not there. Missing. Gone. Not responding to my summons. I hate it when that happens.

But as you can see, all is well. The Webmaster got it back. So let that be a lesson to you, not to take the Webmaster for granted. He may be a bit on the quiet side at times (thanks to his many occupations), but there wouldn’t be any B&W without him (on account of how I don’t know the smallest thing about programming). Actually he probably staged the whole thing just to teach me not to take him for granted. Show-off.… Read the rest

I’ve been re-reading Bertram Wyatt-Brown’s Southern Honor and W.J. Cash’s The Mind of the South. Wyatt-Brown wrote the introduction to a new edition of Cash’s book in 1991 – and a very good introduction it is. I particularly like this comment (p. xxxvi):

We need to appreciate how the malady from which he suffered [depression] contributed to his special vision of the South…and provided the seemingly necessary sense of alienation and distance that the subject required. We must also ask ourselves this question: ‘If he had been less angry with himself and his surroundings, if he had lived the ordinary life of a newspaper reporter, how likely was it that he could have broken away, as he did, from

I meant to say something about this article in the Guardian last week, but then that Soapy Joe business came along and pre-empted other ideas. The article discusses a book about Prince Charles and what academics think of his publicly expressed opinions on a range of important subjects.

The heir to the throne has used his position to sound off on architecture, the environment, agriculture and science in a curious blend of the vaguely alternative, the home counties nimbyist and the off-the-wall.

Here is what David Lorimer, the book’s author, has to say:

“He combines a spiritual world view with practical applications. He starts from the basic premise that nature is not a collection of accidents, but has an intrinsic

I found a blogger today who motivated me to say a little more about religion (I’m going to end up writing a damn book, at this rate). The blogger feels a need to educate Dawkins and his cheerleaders, with me chief among them. I can always do with educating (I mean that literally), but this lesson didn’t quite take. Some of what the blogger says is true enough but I doubt that anyone including Dawkins disagrees with it, and the rest of it I maintain is not true.

This is what I would like to tell Dawkins and all of his cheerleaders: they need to go beyond their scientific atheism to a more mature vision of what it means to