This story about creating sperm from stem cells (which can be either male or female stem cells) and this story about a Japanese gadget that can record and replicate smells, present a host of interesting and complicated questions about what, exactly, we think we’re doing with science and technology today.

John Seery takes note of this long NYT article about the relative scarcity of academically successful young men in college. Lots of explanations are proffered. All strike me as at least somewhat plausible. I do see more male than female slackers, but am unsure as to the cause. Do they not take college seriously because it’s not, in their view, worth taking seriously? Perhaps. I’ve seen some slackers who blundered into law school and then did quite well. I’ve also seen some collegiate slackers who have been exceptionally successful in the business world. I’m not saying that "book learnin’" is a girl thing, but wouldn’t it be worth asking what other than "Grand Theft Auto" excites the passions of young men?

There are also maturity issues with some of them. Not made to shoulder any sort of responsibility, or insulated from responsibilities they don’t like, they don’t yet know what it means to be a man.

John, who is manly and gentle, which is to say gentlemanly, concludes in this way:

I don’t know whether it’s time to ring a bell to alert the country that colleges across the nation seem to be graduating a generation of wimpy, diffident, clueless, unmotivated men (see, I’m participating in that wimpiness by refraining from a manly call to arms). Maybe there’s no cause for alarm, and the emphasis should instead be on women’s gains, not men’s temporary setbacks. What I do know is that the story of gender in America has become more complicated.

Yesterday, the 7th Circuit granted a preliminary injunction aginst the enforcement of Southern Illinois University’s non-discrimination policy, as applied to the Christian Legal Society chapter. Jeremy Richey has some background on this particular case. I wrote about these issues here. I may have more when I read the opinion.

That’s the title of this week’s TAE Online column, hot off the presses. (I finished it about two hours ago. That’s what I call service. FWIW, Ben Kunkel here is just as good.)

Update: From Mark Tooley’s description of the setting of Obama’s speech, not to mention the statements of his fellow speakers, Obama emerges, by contrast, as a moral and theological/political giant.

Update #2: I’m going to give Jon Schaff the last word. Beginning from Tooley’s description of the event, and provoked (especially) by Marian Wright Edelman’s speech, Jon has this to say:

Imagine a meeting of the religious right that used this kind of language? What would we read about them? The claims to moral superiority. The belief that their policy preferences have been endorsed by God. The depiction of their opponents as "weasels."

It seems the honest way to have these debates is as follows. The left can claim accurately that Christ wants us to care for the poor. They can then claim that in their opinion a large welfare state is the best way to obey that commandment. That is different from saying Christ wants a large welfare state. Christ tells us to care for the poor, but he is agnostic on how to go about it. Likewise, all agree that Christ wants us to care for the weakest among us. Religious conservatives believe that includes the unborn. So let’s have a debate about what we owe, if anything, to the unborn.

Jonah Goldberg has a nice long review of FF’s recent book here. A snippet:

Francis Fukuyama, the author of The End of History, is a man constitutionally determined to find the permanent theory of everything. It seems, however, that America at the Crossroads represents less a serious theoretical exegesis than a momentary crisis of confidence by one of the smartest observers around. It is a snapshot taken at a moment of maximum neo-conservative despair stemming from confusion over the Iraq war and the nature of the Islamist threat. In a Huntington age, he is unwilling to relinquish the vision of a Fukuyama world. As such, this book offers useful insights into the internal contradictions within and among conservative policymakers, but ultimately it creates more bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion than it dispels.

Read the whole thing.  

The Weekly Standard draws our attention to this study of parking tickets racked up by UN diplomats that go unpaid because of diplomatic immunity. The authors find a close correlation between the frequency of parking ticket violations and the level of corruption in the home countries (as measured by several international indexes of corruption). Egyptian diplomats, for example, racked up more than 16,000 unpaid parking tickets between 1997 and 2002.

Congratulations to this month’s winners of a No Left Turns mug! The winners are as follows:

Matt Mingus
Ian Hanchett
Lisa Cook
Lena Johnson
Karen Valli

I’m late in noticing it, I know, but Prof. Harvey Mansfield was the commencement speaker at Hillsdale College this year and you can read the text of his remarks in the June issue of Imprimis. Rather than focusing directly on the question of "manliness" Mansfield, instead, took up the question of femininity or womanliness--and did this, as he put it, by way of suggestion. This method was, for him, both wise and prudent--but it leaves open a host of questions (perhaps to be addressed by others as he seems to both hint at and hope for).

The most compelling "suggestion" Mansfield makes is in the title itself: A New Feminism. The title takes on the dual purpose of "suggesting" both that there is something wrong with the current feminism and--which is more--that there may be something good in feminism as such (or reconfigured, or reconstituted, or rightly understood). Many thinkers and writers have attempted to take on the task of redefining what feminism "really is" in the (vain and, perhaps, vainglorious) hope of saving feminism from itself. Indeed, most books that one reads these days from feminists are books that seek to set feminism on the "right track"--either by harkening back to its "founding" or by insisting that it re-birth itself drawing on principles either missed in its founding or incompletely understood at that time. But Mansfield does not make such an attempt here. Because he merely suggests things, he does not have to enter into the fray of that presumptuous discussion.

What he does do is begin with some different conclusions about the natures of both men and women than those adopted by feminism’s fore-mothers. To put it simply, he notes that men and women are both the same and different. Feminism began by emphasizing the "sameness" of men and women over (and sometimes against) their differences in order to achieve a more equitable situation for women vis a vis the workplace and politics. But the standard of judging its success should not be whether or not that project was successful (it was) but whether or not it has produced greater happiness. A mere glance at the covers of most women’s magazines (and, increasingly, one might add--the men’s magazines) in the grocery line suggests that it has not produced much happiness at all.

Mansfield seems to suggest that the problem with the current feminism’s origins (in Beauvoir and others) is that it was not nuanced enough. In denying the existence of or denigrating the existence of "femininity" we seem to have created a sexless society in which no one really seems to enjoy both our common and different natures. Mansfield seems to pine for a feminism that recognizes and encourages femininity--but emphatically states that putting the genie back into the bottle (especially regarding the workplace and politics) is both impossible and, probably, undesirable. So what then can best work to secure our happiness?

A most telling suggestion about how to get to a better place comes in the section where Mansfield reconsiders the old "Double Standard" regarding sex:

The traditional double standard of sexual morality had been higher for women than for men, but feminists posited that men could get away with anything. Rather than trying to elevate the standard for men’s sexual behavior up to that of women, as nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century feminists proposed, the Beauvoir feminists proposed to lower the standard for women down to that of men. The result of abolishing the double standard has been to do away with any standard. Moderate feminists such as Naomi Wolfe have begun to have second thoughts about this result.

Thank God the World Cup only happens every four years. I can’t stand the suspense of high-scoring 3-2 games! What kind of sport is it that wastes such amazing fitness and athletic talent on a game where you can’t use your hands on the ball, where 4 points is a super high scoring game ( was there a single game this year where any team scored 4 goals or more??), and where a tie is settled with penalty kicks instead of the American way, "Sudden Death" overtime?

Can’t use it. Give me the NBA or NFL any time over this typically silly European "sport."

The final injustice: France was--it pains me to say--the obviously superior team. Notwithstanding the joy at seeing France lose for political/cultural reasons, this would never happen in major American sports.

This Pew poll analysis provides some context for the interest in Barack Obama. Here’s the conclusion:

As scholars who doubt the existence of a culture war point out, there remains in the United States a (very) large corps of moderate citizens and voters, and these voters truly hold the balance of power in American elections. These voters, and even a large portion of seculars, have overwhelmingly positive views of religion and desire an important public and political role for religious symbols and values. The analyses reported here suggest that even among many of these centrist citizens and voters, the Democratic Party is not seen as friendly toward religion, and these analyses show that this is strongly related to the Party’s general reputation and electoral outcomes.

This second dimension of the Democrats’ problem also suggests an alternative route to overcoming their recent struggles with religion. That is, instead of having to peel away at the conservative Christian base of the GOP, the Democrats may benefit simply from convincing centrists of their general friendliness toward religion. Attempting to convince the public of their friendliness to religion, however, may carry risks of its own for the Democrats. Our analysis indicates that among seculars, who have become one of the core constituencies of the Democratic Party, those who view the Democrats as friendly toward religion were actually less likely to have voted for Kerry than were those who view the Party as unfriendly toward religion.

Of course, none of this is to suggest that perceptions of Democrats’ friendliness to religion are the new linchpin of American politics or the single key to understanding electoral outcomes. But in a nation where the electorate is as closely divided as the American electorate has been in recent years, any one of a number of factors could, conceivably, serve to tip the balance in one direction or another. Perceptions of the Democrats’ friendliness toward religion may be one such factor.

In other words, there may be some portion of the electorate for whom Obama’s generally religion-friendly position--despite its predictably liberal conclusions on almost every issue--is sufficient to move them in the Democratic direction.

The one thing that gives me pause, however, is the failure of the Pew analysts to take race into account. I suspect that African-Americans, generally speaking, regard Democrats as friendly toward religion. By not controlling for that factor in their analysis, the Pew folks may, first of all, have overstated the perception of Democratic friendliness toward religion and, second, have overstated the prospects for moving people in the Democratic direction by altering public perceptions.

Of course, as they note, in a closely divided electorate, it doesn’t necessarily take much movement to shift the outcome. This is less true in the House of Representatives, where there are very few genuinely competitive seats, but it could make a difference in Senate races and perhaps even in a presidential race.

Looking at the 2004 state-by-state results, there six states that GWB won narrowly: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, New Mexico, Nevada, and Ohio. Ohio would have been in the Kerry column with a shift of roughly 69,000 votes (1.3% of the electorate), Florida with a shift of 191,000 votes (2.5%). Had 0.43% of the voters in Iowa shifted, along with 0.6% of the voters in New Mexico and 1.3% in Nevada, Kerry would have won the electoral vote (without, of course, necessarily winning the fictitious national popular vote).

Now, factor in a consideration of religious affiliation by state. Evangelicals are the largest or second-largest bloc of potential voters in each of the six states. In two states (Iowa and Ohio), mainline Protestants are the largest; in one (New Mexico, naturally), Latino Catholics are the largest. While there’s all sorts of talk about a leftward drift among evangelicals, I continue to believe that an issue like abortion will continue to loom relatively large for them, as it will for Catholics. The religious voters most likely to be susceptible to Democratic appeals are mainline Protestants, who have been migrating toward the left and diminishing in number (thanks both to the aging of the population in the pews and the well-documented silly trendiness of the denominational hierarchies and/or bureaucracies).

I’m late to this party, but Barack Obama’s speech on religion and politics has been getting lots of attention. Peter Wood is suspicious of a good bit of it. Kevin Drum is cautiously favorable. At Mirror of Justice, Thomas Berg kicked off an exchange that included a number of interesting interventions, more indeed than I can accommodate without adding these links.

I don’t think I’m quite as suspicious of the speech as Wood is, but I do think that it is an interestingly confused (or perhaps carefully strategic, though I doubt it) presentation by a man likely to be a major force in the Democratic Party. I’m going to give some more thought to it and write something formal for one of my publication venues.

In the meantime, here’s an example of what’s interestingly confused:

over the long haul, I think we make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in people’s lives -- in the lives of the American people -- and I think it’s time that we join a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy.

And if we’re going to do that then we first need to understand that Americans are a religious people. 90 percent of us believe in God, 70 percent affiliate themselves with an organized religion, 38 percent call themselves committed Christians, and substantially more people in America believe in angels than they do in evolution.

This religious tendency is not simply the result of successful marketing by skilled preachers or the draw of popular mega-churches. In fact, it speaks to a hunger that’s deeper than that - a hunger that goes beyond any particular issue or cause.

Each day, it seems, thousands of Americans are going about their daily rounds - dropping off the kids at school, driving to the office, flying to a business meeting, shopping at the mall, trying to stay on their diets - and they’re coming to the realization that something is missing. They are deciding that their work, their possessions, their diversions, their sheer busyness, is not enough.

They want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives. They’re looking to relieve a chronic loneliness, a feeling supported by a recent study that shows Americans have fewer close friends and confidants than ever before. And so they need an assurance that somebody out there cares about them, is listening to them - that they are not just destined to travel down that long highway towards nothingness.

Can you tell whether he means this as an anthropological observation, a theological observation, or both? Here’s his (sort of) answer:

It wasn’t until after college, when I went to Chicago to work as a community organizer for a group of Christian churches, that I confronted my own spiritual dilemma.

I was working with churches, and the Christians who I worked with recognized themselves in me. They saw that I knew their Book and that I shared their values and sang their songs. But they sensed that a part of me that remained removed, detached, that I was an observer in their midst.

And in time, I came to realize that something was missing as well -- that without a vessel for my beliefs, without a commitment to a particular community of faith, at some level I would always remain apart, and alone.

And if it weren’t for the particular attributes of the historically black church, I may have accepted this fate. But as the months passed in Chicago, I found myself drawn - not just to work with the church, but to be in the church.

For one thing, I believed and still believe in the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change, a power made real by some of the leaders here today. Because of its past, the black church understands in an intimate way the Biblical call to feed the hungry and cloth the naked and challenge powers and principalities. And in its historical struggles for freedom and the rights of man, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world. As a source of hope.