A Back Eddy in the Moscow Everglades

Let me begin by inviting the uninterested to just skip this one, a post on one particular backwater eddy in the swamp that has become the Moscow Everglades. At the same time, some may be interested in this feature of our ongoing “rage for diversity” campaign because it is part of the reason that some …

Survey Reveals Downtown Moscow Parking Myth

Everyone knows that we have a parking problem downtown. But the problem is that we don’t always get the ideal parking space we wanted, which is not exactly the same thing as not getting a good parking place. As the agitation of a few against New St. Andrews College continues, one of the staple arguments …

Love and Loyalty

When you are in a conflict with a group of people over the course of several years, at some point you come to realize what kind of thing sets them off. Of course, as we have been dealing with the intoleristas in Moscow, it would be an excusable mistake for someone to argue that anything …

Going South and North At the Same Time

In his wonderful book Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton points out the tendency non-believers have to throw any available rock at the Christian faith, never mind that the rocks might not all be consistent with each other. He points out that infidels, for example, say that Christianity disparages women and children, but then they turn around to …

Prejudice Is A Two-Way Street

I submitted the piece below to the Daily News as a response to a Town Crier column that ran last night. In his Town Crier piece last Wednesday, Clifton Anderson granted that “in America, Wilson has the right to his own opinions, of course.” And precisely because this is an op-ed page in America, I …

Execution of Homosexuals?

I recently received a letter from a lady on the other side of Moscow’s own little version of the national cultural divide. We had been scheduled to meet, and she was writing to cancel that meeting. According to the letter, the thing that concerned her was something that had to be addressed (by me) before …

He Who Says A, Must Say B

Bear with me a moment. I would like to sketch the outlines of an argument showing how a denial of Calvinism will lead (over time) to the canons of political correctness. But before doing that, allow me to define both terms. By Calvinism I mean the doctrine of God’s exhaustive sovereignty. By political correctness, I …

Finally, a Retraction

A week ago last Friday, the Idaho Statesman ran an article by Nick Gier, in which he intimated that we were neo-Nazis, and from which, since that time, he has tried to distance himself. Some nameless individual at the Statesman caught the drift of Gier’s argument (!) and made it explicit in the headline. When …

For Love of the Code, Part Deux

One of my on-going volunteer interlocutors has pointed out that the section of the Idaho Code I cited a post or so ago (requiring Bible reading in public schools) is a four-decades old dead duck, legally speaking. She points out that it was passed in 1963 and declared unconstitutional in 1964. She did not add, …