Ross Douthat, Where Should Agnostics Go on Sundays?

For [Perry] Bacon himself, the key obstacle to a return to churchgoing seems to be the fear of a kind of intellectual inconsistency or hypocrisy, for himself but especially as a parent. “I don’t want to take her to a place that has a specific view of the world,” he writes of his daughter, “as well as answers to the big questions and then have to explain to Charlotte that some people agree with all of the church’s ideas, Dad agrees with only some and many other people don’t agree with any.”

To which I might respond: Why not? The desire to bring up your child inside a coherent world picture that parents and schools and churches all mutually reinforce is an admirable one; it speaks to the natural human desire for wholeness and integration. But if that kind of environment doesn’t exist for you, if you yourself don’t have a world picture that fully integrates the political and the moral with the metaphysical, then introducing your kids to a multiplicity of experiences and values and acknowledging upfront that people have different answers to the big questions and you can value institutions without fully agreeing with them — all this seems like an entirely responsible way to parent.

Aaron Lake Smith, Finding God in Punk Anarchism

I wanted to be working for the spirit and the common good, but as with all compromised positions in life, didn’t know how to extract myself from the mire or start over.

Ed Lyons, Why is Mass. always in a state of emergency?:

The migrant shelter crisis has brought our state’s problematic emergency law back into public view. Our Legislature somehow shrugged in response to an unprecedented flow of migrants and asked Gov. Maura Healey to change — all by herself —  a marvelous law it once passed with pride.

Healey cannot change our first-in-the-nation “Right to Shelter” legal guarantee all by herself, without invoking a formal emergency under the 1950 Civil Defense Act. House Speaker Ron Mariano advised her to do just that in October…

The primary reason we will see more unnecessary use of these emergency powers is that Massachusetts politics has problems that will increase demands for executive actions. We have a Legislature that is popular, unproductive, and invincible. [Ed. note:  I believe that their popularity is due in part to the fact that they are unproductive.  See also former-Gov. Baker.]

We have chronic policy problems, such as housing, climate, transit, and childcare— that we are not making much progress on.

We have a Commonwealth of cities and towns that often undermines solutions to those chronic problems at the local level, and they send legislators to Beacon Hill who do not want to contradict officials back home…

Dan Drezner, Useless Partisanship Weakens Necessary Partisanship: Continue reading →