I've been reading this book my man Franz laid on me. It's less a book than a collection of essays, all by the recently deceased philosopher Richard Rorty, who calls himself a protege of the old-school American Pragmatist, and favorite of mine, John Dewey. It's been getting me thinking quite a bit.

Franz was the one who originally turned me on to Dewey. He gave me The Public and Its Problems when we first met in mid 2003; reading this book in the thick of the Dean campaign created the cornerstone of my positive political idealism (as opposed to my reactionary anti-war activism). I've long wanted to try and write this out as a kind of manifesto, and someday I probably will, but that's a bit off the track for this post.

So Rorty's book is a bit more unabashedly heady than the stuff of Dewey's that I've come to know. He's addressing an academically philosophical audience, so it's more obtuse and answers a bunch of questions that most of us take for granted. Still, those questions underly a lot, and I like the way he deals with them.

The first essays outline the concept of pragmatism as a romantic polytheism, which breaks down as follows:

I don't want to offend anyone with this post, but I might. C'est la vie.

So, one of my newest and favorite blogging pleasures is The Brody File from the Christian Broadcasting Network (aka parent org of The 700 Club). Mr. Brody is a pretty good writer, and he's covering politics -- mostly the GOP presidential nomination process -- from an angle distinctly different from my own.

I find this kind of perspective valuable. I have been generally digging on The Right's Field, which is on a similar beat, but that's written by people who are on my side and in some cases my friends, so it just doesn't have the savory flavor and nuance of getting into the head of the Other.

Anyway, reading the Brody File seems like a good way to get in touch with mentalities that I don't often encounter socially, which is worthy even (especially) when I may disagree with said mentality. Keeps things nimble and limber. I wish there were a similar blog -- meaning readable and relatively non-propagandistic -- that was on the "Bomb Iran" tip that most GOP candidates (save Ron Paul) seem to be rolling on. That would be tight.

Back to the point, in the first Republican debate, three of the ten candidates stated that they did not in fact believe in evolution. The rest -- especially the great tan hope Mitt Romney -- have been doing the politician potty-walk ever since, and Brody has been following it, for obvious reasons.

In this post he publishes some letters from readers presenting arguments for the creationist viewpoint: