If you’re not a Darwinian conservative or even a postmodern conservative, it may be because you really think that we must attend to both reason and revelation to understand who whole human persons are. These Thomistic conservatives have mentioned us--and in a very classy and thoughtful way. So we’re happy to mention them back, although their real identity is very mysterious.

A few posts over on my other site:

Compassionate conservatism doesn’t require government.

Reflections on efforts to charter new cities in the Atlanta metro area: rent-seeking, Tocqueville, or something else?

Thoughts about Walter Russell Mead’s essay on religion and foreign policy.

This is an unpredictably interesting review of an unpredictably interesting book. One snippet:

Luker traces the debate about sex education back to its invention by the “social hygienists” of the Progressive era, but she locates the source of present-day hostilities in the sexual revolution of the 1960’s, which she calls as “disorienting and historically important” as the French, American and Russian Revolutions. “Like them,” she writes, “it will continue to reshape human life in profound ways for many, many years to come.”

Another:

The advent of contraception and abortion may have allowed some women to pursue their dreams, but “by loosening men’s ties to marriage and family” it made those more interested in marriage than careers more likely to wind up as poor, single mothers. Luker also thinks that marriage is under stress, although, being a sociologist, she ascribes that stress to socioeconomic forces — the impoverishment of the working class, which makes the poor less able to afford marriage; the rise of a wealthy elite free not to worry about the vicissitudes of single parenthood — rather than to declining American morals. Luker even sees merit in abstinence education. While researching her book, she was stunned to learn how much pressure teenagers now put on one another to have sex. By making it a virtue to refrain, she says, “abstinence programs may in fact provide valuable social support for the idea that young people (young women in particular) don’t have to be sexually active if they don’t want to be.” They could create a “zone of sexual autonomy.”

I like chewing over Pew polls, which provide some of the most thorough documentation of public opinion at the intersection of religion and politics. The latest one, released Thursday, is no different.

The most politically interesting finding is this:

The survey finds that the Republican Party is viewed less positively in its approach to religion by a constituency that has played a pivotal role in electoral politics in recent years: white evangelical Protestants. Currently just under half of evangelicals (49%) say the GOP is friendly to religion, a decline of 14 points in the past year. Catholics also are far less likely to view the Republican Party as friendly to religion; just 41% say that today, compared with 55% about a year ago.

More broadly, the decline in the proportion of Americans who view the Republican Party as being friendly to religion occurred uniformly across the parties. The proportion of Republicans who say the Republican Party is friendly to religion dropped by eight percentage points, while falling nine points among both Democrats and political independents.

As the ubiquitous John Green told the NYT:

“It’s unclear how directly this will translate into voting behavior,” Mr. Green said, “but this is a baseline indicator that religious conservatives see the party they’ve chosen to support as less friendly to religion than they used to.”

He speculated that religious conservatives could feel betrayed that some Republican politicians recently voted to back stem cell research, and that a Republican-dominated Congress failed to pass an amendment outlawing same-sex marriage.

“At the minimum, there will be less good will toward the Republican Party by these conservative religious groups, and a disenchantment that the party will be able to deliver on its promises,” Mr. Green said.

Of course, the Democrats remain in much worse shape on this dimension, with only 26% of respondents regarding them as religion-friendly, this in a country where 71% of the repondents want more religious influence on the country and 51% want more religious influence on government (and 67% regard the U.S. as a Christian nation, whatever that means [and I’m not sure it means much]).

The report also attempts to explore the religious left, and discovers that it’s for the most part more religious than left. Stated another way, "On many matters of politics and policy, the views of progressive Christians are not much more liberal than those of the general public." There’s a gap, in other words, between the left and the religious left, not to mention between the rank-and-file of the religious left and its so-called leadership, which has, I think, positioned itself closer to the secular left. How many divisions does Jim Wallis have?

If you want more, read this piece by the estimable Julia Duin.

And Steve, you’ll want to look at the stuff on religion and the environment, where I found this conclusion interesting but unsurprising:

very few people say that their religious views are the most important influence on their thinking about environmental regulations. Asked to choose among a list of five possible influences – what they have seen in the news, a personal experience, their education, their religious beliefs, or their friends and family – just 8% said religion was the most important influence. And the number who chose religion was basically the same for those who said environmental regulations are worth the cost as for those who said regulations hurt the economy.

Last weekend, we had a profound, subtle, and well informed--not to mention "cool"--discussion of the politics and culture of what became precisely defined as "rock." This weekend’s topic is the place of television in American political and even liberal education. Arguably the most profound form of culture we actually share with at least our more ordinary students is television. There’s more there there than in popular music. Learned professor Paul Cantor (in his book GILLIGAN UNBOUND) has found theological depth in the X-FILES, complex moral psychology with a libertarian spin the in THE SIMPSONS, and the display of the Socratic conception of the soul in GILLLIGAN’S ISLAND. And Cantor and the brilliant Diana Schaub have disagreed over whether STAR TREK is about life at the end of history described by Kojeve and Fukuyama or a defense of the noble meritocratic principles of the American founding.

In teaching the Tocquevillian view of the way individualism creeps in a democracy, what better resources do we have than Larry David’s wonderfully ironic SEINFELD and CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM? Philosophic pop culture expert Thomas Hibbs’ criticizes SEINFELD as a nihilistic "show about nothing," but others disagree, reminding Hibbs that the show gets us to laugh at more than with pathetically self-absorbed human beings.

I could go on to say a lot about the conservative wisdom--even praised by the humor-challenged Crunchy Cons--of KING OF THE HILL and patriarchy night on HBO--which featured both THE SOPRANOS and the riveting, excellently performed and directed BIG LOVE. But mostly I’m out of touch and have little to say about, for example, the use of philosophers’ names on LOST (about which my students have asked me fairly often).

The WaPo’s Alan Cooperman writes about Jay Hein, who is the new head of the White House Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives. A telling quote:

In contrast to his sometimes-flamboyant predecessors, Hein is a "very orderly and businesslike person" who is well-suited to run the faith-based effort for the remaining 18 months of the Bush administration, said William A. Schambra, an expert on philanthropy at the Hudson Institute, a think tank where Hein once worked.

Because the faith-based office "has a very poor track record when it comes to getting legislation passed," Schambra said, Hein’s task will be "to pull out of the wreckage of the faith-based initiative the pieces of it that really should be preserved as a legacy for the next Republican administration."

This strikes me as in the neighborhood of being correct:

[Sen. Johnny]Isakson [R-GA], who had sat silent throughout the conversation with Frist, spoke up. ” I’m sorry, I can’t keep quiet on this,” he said. “The terrorists and those that are trying their best to attack us – and a lot of that is coming out of Iran – are concentrated on Baghdad. It’s a reflection of the success we’ve had in the majority of the country. If you confront that concentration now with the appropriate force and in conjunction with the Iraqi army and you can break its back, it has the chance to be a very optimistic result. If you turn the other way and say you’re failing, then you’ve handed them a victory. You have to remember the terrorists don’t have to beat us to win. All they have to have us do is quit and go home and they declare victory. You saw what Hezbollah did in South Lebanon.”

There are a couple of other hot spots, I think, but even Fallujah, as I recall, is peaceful now. One explanation for this may be that the religiously and/or ethnically relatively homogeneous places are relatively peaceful. And others may--fortunately or unfortunately, you be the judge--be sorting themselves out in that way, with some internal refugee flow.

Apparently, it might be possible to harvest embryonic stem cells without destroying embryos. For more, go here and here. The NYT article has this:

Dr. Leon Kass, former chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, said, “I do not think that this is the sought-for, morally unproblematic and practically useful approach we need.”

Dr. Kass said the long-term risk of preimplantation genetic diagnosis was unknown and that the present technique was inefficient, requiring blastomeres from many embryos to generate each new cell line. It would be better to derive human stem cell lines from the body’s mature cells, he said, a method researchers are still working on.

Wesley J. Smith is also unimpressed. What about Peter L.?