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Rod Dreher

I have already expectorated all over the crackpot alcohol retailing laws of my new state, and in that vein, let me praise the new Whole Foods in Plymouth Meeting for introducing me to the growler. I made a WF run yesterday, and saw the ingenious way the store gets around Pennsylvania’s crazypants beer law. Because…

An Orthodox friend sends word of a catechumen in his parish, coming to Orthodoxy from Catholicism. My friend is pleased about this, as am I — but I told my friend that as a former Catholic, I have absolutely no feelings of triumphalism about this news. Why? Because I can easily imagine the pain that…

What an unexpected surprise to find in this morning’s NYT a story about Father Moses Berry, an African-American priest of the Orthodox church, who not only pastors a small Orthodox parish in his Missouri hometown, but also runs a tiny museum dedicated to the black history of the village, which is now virtually all-white. Excerpt:…

Fascinating NYT Magazine account today about Omar Hammami, a charismatic boy from small-town Alabama who, having been raised a Baptist, embraced his father’s Islam — and went on to embrace a radical version of same, and to become a celebrated jihadist in Somalia. It’s a portrait of how a young man who had a lot…

David Shenk: Genes are always interacting with the environment, so the new way to think about this is that it’s not nature plus nurture on nature versus nurture. If anything it’s nature interacting with nurture if you have to use those words, so one of the phrases that scientists are using now is G Times…

Randall Stephens, editor of the Journal of Southern Religion, says it has a lot to do with the South’s cultural homogeneity for most of its history. I suspect too that the fact that the South remained agrarian (and comparatively poorer) longer than the North has something to do with it. The way you answer this…

Anthropologist Wade Davis, from his excellent 2009 book “The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World”: Our way of life, inspired in so many ways, is not the paragon of humanity’s potential. Once we look through the anthropological lens and see, perhaps for the first time, that all cultures have unique attributes that…

Libertarian demi-god David Boaz says yeah, yeah, ‘Avatar’ is a melange of leftist cliches, but the Right is ignoring a powerful conservative theme in the film. Excerpt: Conservatives rallied to the defense of Susette Kelo when the Pfizer Corp. and the city of New London, Conn., tried to take her land. She was unreasonable too,…

Over at The Root, Helena Andrews (who is black) writes about why she doesn’t date white guys. The piece is entertaining, but good luck trying to find an actual argument in it. It did make me wonder, though, if it should even be necessary to make an argument about something as personal as that sort…

If you’re like most Americans, you’ll be as startled as I was by the crazypants liquor-buying system in Pennsylvania. The Keystone State, like a handful of other states, maintains a government monopoly on the sale of wine and spirits, and has ridiculous rules on the sale of beer. Here’s an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry…
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