Blogging Hiatus Apparently Ends

Too busy to do anything but check in on other peoples blogs for the last few weeks, I'm back with a few random links and observations.

Random L & O #1: I'm enjoying the work of Os Guinness again, after hearing him speak on Minnesota Public Radio's Westminster Town Hall Forum last week. An earlier MacLaurin Institute talk entitled "Can Freedom Last Forever?" explores similar themes and goes a little deeper. He's an Englishman (sort of modern-day de Tocqueville) who articulates what America is and needs better than most American pundits. He writes and speaks on a broad range of cultural and spiritual topics.

Random L & O #2: I love quotations, pointed and to the point. Mind and Culture from the Cambridge Study Center is a drawer full of sharp knives. Two examples:

Anti-intellectualism is a disposition to discount the importance of truth and the life of the mind. Living in a sensuous culture and an increasingly emotional democracy, American evangelicals in the last generation have simultaneously toned up their bodies and dumbed down their minds. The result? Many suffer from a modern form of what the ancient stoics called "mental hedonism"-having fit bodies but fat minds.
- Os Guinness

What luck for rulers that men do not think.
- Adolf Hitler

Random L & O #3: Psalm 33:5 "He loveth righteousness and judgment: the earth is full of the goodness of the LORD." KJV