Some reading from the pages of the internet

Well, my project at work is over so I am back a-blogging!  Here are some things I've run across the blogosphere in the last few days that I thought I'd share:

• Joshua over at The Pittsford Perennialist has a post on a helpful distinction that many people don't make:  Science vs Scientism.  There is a difference between science as a way of understanding how the world works and "science" as an overwhelming ideology that crowds out other ways of knowing and reasoning. As in all things, ideology poisons what would otherwise be fruitful.  

• Richard Wall has some reflections on an under-appreciated American writer: Why I am interested in John Dos Passos. I first encountered Dos Passos in my freshman college English course at Skagit Valley Community College. I was almost immediately a fan!

• I never knew that Russell Kirk had formally sat down and debated Malcolm X on television, but this short essay by Kirk, reproduced over at The Imaginative Conservative, tells the tale:  Russell Kirk on Malcolm X.  Kirk's take on Malcolm X, written soon after the latter was assassinated, strikes me as quite insightful, particularly the observation that "Revolutions do, indeed, devour their own children." Still, the idea that two of the inhabitants of my own personal Valhalla met and talked and debated is thrilling.  Do you think that somewhere in a vault there is an old video-tape of that encounter?

• Michigan's right to work law in light of Catholic social teaching -- that's the topic of this essay over at The Mirror of Justice by law professor Rick Garnett. He makes some excellent points regarding Catholic social thought and the role of unions, and on the need to combat union abuse of power.  Well worth a read.  

• Stephen Mansfield has a new book on Abraham Lincoln out and there is an excerpt posted regarding Lincoln's last reported words:  Lincoln's Surprising Last Words.  Lincoln is usually portrayed as a skeptic when it comes to religion, and while that is certainly true for most of his life, his experience as president deepened a sense of providential faith in him.  His last words, attested to by his wife Mary Todd Lincoln and generally accepted by a who's who of modern Lincoln scholars, shows that his faith was blossoming into something far more robust.  What were his last words? "We will visit the Holy Land and see those places hallowed by the footsteps of the Savior.  There is no place I so such desire to see as Jerusalem." Those do not sound like the words of a religious skeptic.