In the World

I enjoyed Charles McGrath's profile of Stephen Colbert. McGrath's framework is that there used to be two Colberts, the man himself and the blowhard-pundit character. Now there's a third: a real live political actor. I think that's all about right. But I don't know why McGrath writes off Colbert's 2010 congressional testimony as part of the old paradigm.

Thanks for reading and commenting on my blog. Here are the ten posts people read the most this year.

A lot of people didn't like Tony Perkins' CNN Belief Blog post last week, and rightly so. Jesus was a free marketer, long before the concept was developed? Sure, if you say so.

Anytime you say something is new while also ignoring something old, it begs the question of what labels you use and how slippery their definitions are.

There's a sort of dualism that comes up when political commentators talk about conservative evangelicals: either they're powerful and unflappable advocates for the couple of causes we've always associated with them, or they don't really exist as a voting bloc at all.

Tuesday's speech was the most fired up and the readiest to go that we've seen Obama in a good long while.

Here are some things I read recently but didn't get around to blogging about.

Note to Eric Bolling, Dan Gainor and Andrea Tantaros: Tex Richman isn't a Muppet. He's a human character, played by Chris Cooper. I know, it's hard to find time to fact-check when you're busy politicizing the Muppets.

Here are some things I read recently but didn't get around to blogging about.

Years ago I cringed when I saw that the Onion sells a t-shirt with the slogan, "I appreciate the Muppets on a much deeper level than you." My friend John and I had just been discussing the Muppets' sly use of metafictional elements.

Here are some things I read recently but didn't get around to blogging about.

Here are some things I read recently but didn't get around to blogging about.

A couple issues ago the Century ran an article by Matt Fitzgerald of Wellesley Hills UCC in Massachusetts, a church approached by a movie studio that needed a space rental to shoot an upcoming Adam Sandler movie.