Some choose home-schooling for its merits, some fall into home-schooling for financial or ideological reasons, and some have home-schooling thrust upon them.

Sally Thomas at the First Things blog reviews a new book by Gregory and Martine Millman who married in the 1980s and planned to lead a “normal yuppie life.”

“How, then, did they come to write a book called Homeschooling: A Family’s Journey?” asks Thomas.

“Two factors intervened in their quest for a mainstream middle-class life, sending them down an unanticipated long-term detour. The first was their decision to live on one income, with Martine a stay-at-home mother to their six children, a choice that put both private schools and...READ MORE

More readers are learning that “Bill Maher Makes an Adolescent Case Against Religion in Religulous.” That’s because the review by Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman is being picked up by many alternative papers. The Houston Press, for instance. 

Hoberman judges the movie “Initially quite funny in its head-on engagement with star-spangled, self-righteous platitudes.” But the movie takes a turn for the worse when Maher visits a small North Carolina chapel and harangues congregants. Such unplanned confrontations favored the challenger. Especially since the challenger then got to heavily edit the results.

“Such one-sided encounters are more depressing than fun,” writes Hoberman. Much...READ MORE

“Ironically, like ‘safe sex,’ safe speculation has proved to be an illusion.”

So concludes Angelo Matera of Godspy in his post “Thinking Catholic: European leaders blame crisis on ‘speculative capitalism.’”

He says Europeans were suckers for easy subprime mortgage profits, just like Americans, and with the same result. But he credits Europe’s “Catholic roots” with giving Europeans a better handle on the crisis.

For Matera, French President Nicolas Sarkozy summed up the different responses when he said: “We want a capitalism of entrepreneurs. We don’t want speculators.”

Matera hears an echo of Pope John Paul II in that statement, and quotes the 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus at...READ MORE