An important split is emerging within the Democratic Party over abortion. Barack Obama’s reaction to it will tell us a great deal about how he intends to unify people of different views and manage key voting blocs. A group of progressive evangelicals, including Rev. Jim Wallis, has urged Sen. Obama to embrace an “abortion reduction…

A man who created a beefcake calendar of (male) Mormon missionaries has been excommunicated. (Hattip: Andrew Sullivan) Those of you who follow this genre may be interested in the Nuns Having Fun calendar or the Roman Priests beefcake calendar. I’m guessing neither of those had official church approval either.

I was rather stunned to see that Jane Mayer’s new book is reporting that Prof. Martin Seligman helped the U.S. government design its torture regimen. The administration’s torture architects used Seligman’s research on “learned helplessness” to craft their approaches, according to some accounts of Mayer’s book. This struck us as odd. Beliefnet readers are more…

I’m puzzled by the Obama camapaigns response to the new Yorker cover. To me this seemed pretty clearly an effort to mock Obama’s tormentors, not Obama. The depiction of the Terrorist Fist Jab mocks Fox News, not Obama or Muslims. The Michelle Obama afro mocks those who equate any African American with H. Rap Brown,…

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