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When we take the approach that “all are sinners,” we confuse big-time criminality with small-time folly. This moral obfuscation allows the far greater misfeasance of corporate creditors to get airbrushed out of the picture.

Obama’s scheduled Notre Dame commencement has a small, largely powerless, group of Orthodox Catholics singing for publicity to an obliging media. Why did Notre Dame take the bait?

What does the word “God” mean? Anything and everything, depending on whether you’re a Bible-believer or an atheist, a rap artist or a writer for South Park, a peyote-eater or Meg Ryan in a diner…

Bishop Harry Jackson, pleading for the president to maintain the ban on same-sex marriage, calls it the number one domestic issue. But what about, say, the unemployment rate? Will the ban help those without jobs?

“The only crime against humanity that the media takes seriously (and politicians fear is being exposed for) is personal sexual immorality…”

A Mormon mommy blogger ponders spiritual laziness, gay marriage (fine with her), projectile vomiting, the evils of daylight savings time, and the relationship between Mormon-mom perfection and antidepressants.

In response, most likely, to the (fictional) account of the lesser status of women in Catholicism’s most notorious semi-secret society in The Da Vinci Code, a group of women has come together to explain what feminism looks like, Opus Dei-style.

These days, rituals of mourning, praise, and eulogies for celebrities are often enacted in and through the media sphere.

Was Obama’s speech just an exercise in kumbaya idealism?

We might be tempted to dismiss the entire legacy of an artist or thinker whose political position or moral beliefs do not accord with our own enlightened views. We forget that we, like they, are products of an age—and that what we are throwing away might be worth far more than the pieties we cling to.