Perpetual war, news gathering in the Internet age, and the church and women's ordination

• From Daniel Larison:
  • American exceptionalism and dissident conservatives.
  • What Republican foreign policy should be and why the GOP isn’t there yet.
  • Rand’s not his dad.
• From Rod Dreher: Spengler and imperial America.
• Glenn Greenwald via LRC: the ‘war on terror’ — by design — can never end.
• From Noah Millman: on Andrew Sullivan setting out on his own, and the future of journalism in the Internet age.
• From MCJ:
  • Quotation from LaVallette: Ordination of women is a bit like gay marriage: to make it mean something one has to redefine the very fundamentals of the institution concerned to the extent that institution no longer exists and a completely new one emerges. Yes by all means ordain women if you want to but it will no longer be the Catholic Church founded by Jesus Christ. Plenty of them around already. In the same way, s/s marriage requires the redefinition of the natural-law concepts of what “male” and “female” mean and and what the fundamental purposes of marriage are. What strikes me, living in the church (actually, mostly I leave the clergy and lay bureaucracy alone; they leave me alone), is that WO just doesn’t come up, despite a minority living in Protestant countries such as this one trying hard to sell it for 40 years, from lay ‘ministers’ including the few old nuns as pastors to altar girls (none of which, going to a Pope Benedict high-church parish and the Tridentine Mass almost exclusively, I see!). It’s self-limiting; not part of the church’s nature. Different from the defensive retreat Anglo-Catholics had been in for all those years. Plausible: like-minded bishops setting up a church within a church as a ‘Catholic Anglicanism’, what Forward in Faith tried to be. I see the analogy to what Catholics like me do, but like the Buca di Beppo T-shirt says, ‘The Pope’s on our side’. Or rather, we and the Pope are on the side of Christ, the apostles and the ordinary practice of the Catholic religion for centuries. The other side won fair and square in Anglicanism, a fallible denomination in which everything’s up for a vote. The Tractarians, ‘conservative’ against Catholic developed and defined doctrine, thought they were in the infallible church but were proved wrong. By the way, funny how a movement that started by reacting against Catholic emancipation ended up imitating the Catholic Church.
  • On political correctness and the decline in churchgoing.