Fish Rotting From The Head

In the current issue of First Things (if you don't know what that is, consider yourself blessed), Richard John Neuhaus, a more or less openly theocratic Catholic ideologue, attacks Jamie Kirchick's review of God on the Quad (no weblink):

Fifty-three years after Bill Buckley's God and Man at Yale, one might expect Yalies to be a bit less snooty on some questions. James Kirchick, a columnist for the Yale Daily News, reviews Naomi Schaefer Riley's God on the Quad in the New York Sun. Ms. Riley offers a generally favorable assessment of the religiously affihated colleges and universities she has studied. Mr. Kirchick is having none of it. He writes, "How, just to cite one of many examples, does the establishment by Baptist Baylor University of a center to study 'intelligent design' (a trendy euphemism for Creationism) point to her contention that the students who attend these schools are not 'intellectually backward?"' Baylor, we are told, is evidence of religious colleges being "strictly informed by unquestioning and narrow dogma." Really? Leaving aside the scientific merits of intelligent design theory, it is controversial because it dares to challenge the strictly enforced, unquestioned, and narrow dogma of Darwinian evolutionism. (And what, one wonders, might be a questioning dogma?) "The self-proclaimed values of the modern university," writes Mr. Kirchick, "are a commitment to a liberal education." Never mind the grammar, the point is that you wouldn't find a modern university like Yale tolerating such freedom of inquiry. He says of Ms. Riley that "her positivism is unhindered" by what Mr. Kirchick thinks unattractive about religious colleges. I rather doubt that Ms. Riley is a positivist. I suppose he meant that she is an optimist. In any event, the deficiencies in Mr. Kirchnick's education are not necessarily representative of Yale. Although I expect the snootiness about that "other America" may be.

I find there's little more entertaining than observing someone who thinks he's talking down to his opponents when in fact his head is crammed up his own ass. Let's leave the scientific merits of intelligent design theory aside, indeed.

Aside from creationism, other subjects you will not find taught at Yale include: alchemy, cryptozoology, snipe hunting, phrenetics, fortune telling, the authenticity of the Hitler Diaries, trepanation, physiognomy, cryogenics.