Keith Burgess-Jackson

I leave you this fine evening with a column about the Duke lacrosse debacle. That so many Duke professors were so eager to let their ideology dictate their judgment is not only disgraceful, but an affront to academic integrity. Do you suppose they would rush to judgment if their own child were being prosecuted? Of course not. They would give their child the benefit of the doubt. But when it comes to white males being accused of raping a black woman, the defendants get the detriment of the doubt.

I’m 50 years old, but I’ve never owned a dryer. I’ve been hanging clothes on a line in my back yard for more than 14 years. Before that, I used the dryer in my apartment complex. See here for a story about hanging clothes on a line.

This takes the cake for silliness.

Here is a scene from yesterday’s Gent-Wevelgem in Belgium, won by German Marcus Burghardt.

Heaven is not primarily a reward for good actions but a home for good people. What determines whether a man gets to Heaven is not what he has done but what sort of person he is. This follows from both the Catholic and Protestant accounts of who will be saved, to which I referred in Chapter 4. What is needed is the right character, the readiness to perform the right sort of actions, not actually having done them.

(Richard Swinburne, Faith and Reason [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981], 147 [footnote omitted])

Mylan Engel sent a link to this debate.

To the Editor:

I enjoyed “The Presidency’s Mormon Moment,” by Kenneth Woodward (Op-Ed, April 9). I agree “that no candidate for public office should have to apologize for his or her religious faith.” I might add that no candidate for public office should feel that he or she has to have a religious faith.

Bert Van Gorder
Portland, Ore., April 10, 2007

Note from KBJ: The people, and not Bert Van Gorder, will determine the significance (if any) of a candidate’s religion (or lack thereof).

Read this. Of what business is it of The New York Times how much business executives earn? Executives are accountable to the stockholders and nobody else. Perhaps the Times should take a hard look at how much Arthur Sulzberger Jr earns.

Here.

Kevin Stroup sent a link to this disturbing story. By the way, has anyone had trouble getting to this blog today? I fired up the computer for the day at about 4:00 this afternoon, having taught all morning and done some reading (W. D. Ross’s The Right and the Good [1930]) on the back patio after I got home. I couldn’t get to my blog, either to view it or to post to it. I called BlueHost, which hosts the blog, and was told that someone had been abusing the server, which had to be taken down for repair or maintenance. (How does one abuse a server?) After about an hour, it was back up and my blog accessible. I’m just wondering whether anyone else noticed.

Addendum: Sir William David Ross (1877-1971), who translated Aristotle and wrote original and important works of ethics, is one of my favorite philosophers. I share his moderate deontology and his moral conservatism. Here he is.

Here.