Naming something is the first step to dealing with it. Thanks to Terry Mattingly for teaching me a new word: Flexidoxy.

Every Saturday, journalist David Brooks and his family can choose between three services at their synagogue in Washington, D.C.

Rabbis lead a mainstream, almost Protestant, rite in the sanctuary. Then there is an informal “Havurah (fellowship)” service led by lay people, including a 45-minute talk-back session. The erudite leaders often pause to explain why the Torah’s more judgmental and dogmatic passages don’t mean what they seem to mean.

Finally, throngs of young adults pack the wonderfully named “Traditional Egalitarian” service, which features longer Torah readings, a rigorous approach to liturgy and what Brooks called a “somewhat therapeutic” seminar blending spirituality and daily life.

“It can get pretty New Age-y,” said Brooks, at his Weekly Standard office. “It’s as if you’re in an Orthodox shul and then Oprah Winfrey comes on.”

It was a rabbi in Montana who gave Brooks the perfect word — “Flexidoxy” — to describe this faith. This is what happens when Americans try to baptize their souls in freedom and tradition, radical individualism and orthodoxy, all at the same time. One scholar found a Methodist pastor’s daughter who calls herself a “Methodist Taoist Native American Quaker Russian Orthodox Buddhist Jew.”

Barack Obama has a lot of things going for him, but once his positions get scrutinized, he may have trouble getting the votes of the masses. For example, he has an unusually extreme, even for liberals, Anti-Gun Stance.

A discussion about guns has broken out in the comments, but I’d like to raise some questions. How could anyone–let alone a former professor of Constitutional Law like Obama– think the 2nd Amendment is just to protect the gun-owning rights of hunters and skeet shooters?

Did the founders think “militias” were groups of guys who went out on hunting trips? Or a club devoted to SKEET SHOOTING? Doesn’t the reference in the 2nd Amendment to a “militia” suggest that an armed populace is to be a safeguard against enemies foreign and domestic? While the 2nd Amendment certainly protects hunters and skeet shooters, isn’t its major purpose to give citizens the right to use weapons to defend themselves?

Young people today know hardly anything about history, literature, or Western culture. We knew that, but study proves it. Among the findings,

Among 1,200 students surveyed:

•43% knew the Civil War was fought between 1850 and 1900.

•52% could identify the theme of 1984.

•51% knew that the controversy surrounding Sen. Joseph McCarthy focused on communism.

I’m positive my students here at Patrick Henry College know all this stuff. What amuses me is the way they often draw a blank at pop cultural references. Ask them about Britney Spears, High School Musical, and similar staples of the adolescent universe, and you often just get a blank stare. They WILL, however, tell you all about Homer, Dostoevsky, and deToqueville.

Michael Kinsley has written a hilarious take on the New York Times story about John McCain: McCain and the Times: The Real Questions. A sample:

Many readers of last week’s New York Times article about McCain, including me, read that article as suggesting that Sen. McCain may have had an affair with a lobbyist eight years ago. The Times, however, has made clear that its story was not about an affair with a lobbyist. Its story was about the possibility that eight years ago, aides to McCain had held meetings with McCain to warn him about the appearance that he might be having an affair with the lobbyist.

This is obviously a much more important question. To be absolutely clear: the Times itself was not suggesting that there had been an affair, or even that there had been the appearance of an affair. The Times was reporting that there was a time eight years ago when some people felt there might be the appearance of an affair, although others, apparently including Sen. McCain himself, apparently felt that there was no such appearance.

Similarly, I am not accusing the New York Times of screwing up again by publishing an insufficiently sourced article then defending itself with a preposterous assertion that it wasn’t trying to imply what it obviously was trying to imply. I am merely reporting that some people worry that other people might be concerned that the New York Times has created the appearance of screwing up once again.

What I wrote was that some people had expressed concern that the Times article might have created the appearance of charging that McCain had had an affair. My critics have charged that I was charging the Times with charging McCain with having had an affair. Such a charge would be unfair to the New York Times, since the Times article, if you read it carefully (very carefully), does not make any charge against McCain except that people in a meeting eight years ago had suggested that other people eight years ago might reach a conclusion — about which the Times expressed no view whatsoever — that McCain was having an affair.

The piece goes on and on, creating level after level of possibilities of appearances.