In an interview with Christianity Today, Barack Obama answered this question:
“You’ve talked about your experience walking down the aisle at Trinity United Church of Christ, and kneeling beneath the cross, having your sins redeemed, and submitting to God’s will. Would you describe that as a conversion? Do you consider yourself born again?”

I am a Christian, and I am a devout Christian. I believe in the redemptive death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I believe that that faith gives me a path to be cleansed of sin and have eternal life. But most importantly, I believe in the example that Jesus set by feeding the hungry and healing the sick and always prioritizing the least of these over the powerful. I didn’t ‘fall out in church’ as they say, but there was a very strong awakening in me of the importance of these issues in my life. I didn’t want to walk alone on this journey. Accepting Jesus Christ in my life has been a powerful guide for my conduct and my values and my ideals.

Great and widely-applicable story from Dawn Eden at National Review Online, from a discussion of Planned Parenthood and the left’s absolute hatred of abstinence education:

Some 1,700 years ago, a hermit living in the Egyptian desert predicted “a time is coming when people will go mad.”“And when they see someone who is not mad,” continued the man known today as St. Anthony the Great, “they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad, you are not like us.’”

What are some examples of this syndrome?

Well, getting $600 apiece has its charms. According to this report, a deal has been struck in Congress that will give each taxpayer $600, plus $300 per child. A family of four would thus get $1800. (Earlier versions would have given $800 to taxpayers, but this agreed-upon plan is a little less so as to give $300 to those who pay no taxes.) The checks will be cut between May and July. The cost will be some $150 billion, about the cost of an average year in Iraq. But it IS our money, after all, just given back. Yes, getting that check will be nice, but is it a good idea?

Finally an article that addresses what I had been wondering about. We know that the Social Security system will be in big trouble when we baby-boomers retire. But what will happen to the stock market once we all sell off our IRAs to fund our golden-year lifestyles? Won’t all those sell orders flood the market and drive the prices down, thus leaving us old-timers with less money after all, despite all that saving and investing? The linked article acknowledges the problem, but offers some hope.

William Kristol calls for an end to the “more-conservative-than-thou” discord in the Republican ranks and explains the difference between Ronald Reagan, who came to office as the leader of an ideological movement, and the normal state of politics, in which ideological movements use the candidates they have. Read Waiting for Reagan. Does he have a point?

Now that the New Age candidate, Dennis Kucinich, has dropped out of the race, that would be John Edwards. Charles Krauthammer writes about the man’s “breathtaking” posturing, grandiosely condemning the very things he voted for (the Iraq war, free trade with China, the new bankruptcy bill, the Patriot Act, No Child Left Behind, disposing nuclear waste in Nevada) during his short and indistinguished one term in the Senate. And how he is posing as the angry revolutionary who has been fighting for the proletariat all his life. Please.