Advocates of Arizona school choice continue to fight in a decade-long controversy surrounding the state’s scholarship-tax-credit laws. Last week, the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld laws that aid almost 25,000 children in Arizona private schools through the tax-deductible donations of private and corporate donors. [Correction: The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments last week after the district court upheld the law.]

Since 1997, taxpayers have received tax credit - up to $1,000 per married couple and $500 per individual - for making donations to School-Tuition-Organizations (STOs). These non-profit groups grant tuition funds to individual students, retaining only ten percent for administrative costs.

Last year, Arizona’s 56 STOs received some $51 million in tax-donations and distributed $ 41 million in scholarships to 357 private schools. Because many STOs are religiously affiliated, critics cite these same statistics as proof that the tax-credit program is an unconstitutional establishment of religion.

Supporters of the tax credit defend the program’s legality and point to the advances made in Arizona’s education system through broadening parents’ choices. Dr. Thomas Askew is headmaster of Tucson’s Cornerstone Christian Academy and member of the selection committee for the state’s largest, evangelical Christian STO. Askew told WoW, “The exponential growth of charter schools and the incremental growth of private schools due to tax credits has really made the average Arizona taxpayer-consumer much more savvy about the choices available to their children.”

Askew credits the program for his own school’s increase in enrollment and diversity. When he became headmaster in 2001, 34 percent of 133 students received scholarships. Now, 74 percent of 178 students at the academy receive aid.

Despite encouraging data from his school and others like it, Askew says that after ten years of opposition, the courts will make the final decision: “We’ll never get past the local challenges until the Supreme Court rules that it’s constitutional.”

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger joins Rudy Giuliani as another “moderate” Republican to back John McCain. Drudge is also reporting that Nancy Reagan privately supports McCain’s presidential bid.

And did you see the debate from the Reagan Library last night? Was it just me, or did they all look like they were sitting behind too-small, elementary school–size desks?

Warning!  This is a post about art, not politics.  Philippe de Montebello is the current and longest-serving (30 years) director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  He is native of France, a graduate of Harvard, and a man who does not worship the passing fads of art and culture.  He is, in short, a conservative.  De Montebello is retiring this fall, and so there’s been a deluge of stories about him.  He’s an anamoly in the art world. 

At a time when museums pander to get visitors, either by flogging, yet again, the long-dead Impressionist horse or by selling their souls to popular culture with exhibitions of motorcycles or electric guitars, the Met has drawn in its public the old-fashioned way — routinely offering it intellectually substantial fare.

In a commencement speech I heard him deliver last year, he said that art should not be self-absorbed, that it should be important to the larger world, that it should be technically excellent.   

Of late, rather than making contemporary art one element among many in its programming, one museum after another has mortgaged its identity to new works, handing over to them disproportionately large swaths of staff time, financial resources and exhibition space. Worse, as did Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Gallery last year, some museums have recklessly sold off prize portions of their collections of older art to purchase still-wet canvases whose value has been determined by the fads of the moment rather than the test of time.

De Montebello was a conservative in the world of art and culture, and he earned the respect of his critics by defending his decisions and beliefs with intellectual ferocity, and with dignity.

After hearing Isaiah 40:31 at a classmate’s funeral in August, McKenzie High School students decided to use the Bible verse as their class motto. The verse even referenced the Oregon school’s mascot, eagles. After changing “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles” to “They that believe shall mount up with wings like eagles,” the seniors believed the verse would be acceptable despite the religious reference.

But the school board said the verse’s origin, despite its modification, violated the first amendment’s establishment of religious clause. McKenzie school superintendent Sally Storm said the company that was going to publish the graduation announcements called the school district office when they recognized the motto’s scriptural origin. According to Associated Press, Storm said she had no choice but to contact the school district’s attorney: “My duty is to follow the law in this case — the U.S. Constitution — which doesn’t allow public schools to either interfere with the practice of religion or establish a religious practice.”

David Cortman, Alliance Defense Fund senior legal counsel, told WoW, “I think it’s sad that school administrators believe upholding the First Amendment requires eliminating any reference to faith.” The school board’s actions were not legal, and the ADF, a legal alliance that defends religious liberty, would readily take this case, if the students decided to take action against the school board, though they have not at this point.

Cortman said the censorship was an overreaction, just as other schools have overreacted about religious references in valedictorian speeches and mention of the golden rule in educational contexts: “Just because speech might have biblical references doesn’t mean it’s a constitutional crisis.”

I don’t mean to linger on Starbucks, I really don’t.  But the company - from opening two stores on opposite sides of the street, to its prominence in films - really is a weird metaphor for American culture.  It’s a corporate monster that we corporately loathe and worship.  It represents the best, and the worst, in America.  You’ve already read here recently about the incipient $1 bottomless cup (that may be coming to a Starbucks near you) and the relative merits of the Waffle House.  Starbucks is getting a lot of attention these days, and not necessarily the kind it likes.  Take this story, which starts off all too familiarly, but with a whole new end:

When a Starbucks moved in next door, the coffee fanatics who run the Broadway Cafe [in St. Louis] trembled. Sure, they roasted their own beans and served up handmade espresso drinks to a loyal clientele. But would it be enough to fight off a corporate behemoth?  That was nearly 10 years ago, and now the results are in: the Starbucks is about to shut down.

This is less the triumph of a small, authentic (read: puritan) coffee house versus the giant, hydra-headed beast of Starbucks and more about the triumph of the free market.

The American Academy of Pediatrics had hoped to stop the premiere episode of a new ABC legal drama that it says could undermine children’s vaccinations. In the opening story line of “Eli Stone,” the mother of an autistic child is awarded $5.2 million in damages after it is revealed that the CEO of a vaccine maker kept his daughter from getting the company’s mercury-based vaccine.

This week, the American Academy of Pediatrics fired off a letter to network executives urging them to cancel the show. ABC refused, but agreed to air a disclaimer and a link to the CDC’s autism site.

The show’s producers say it is “even-handed” and presents both sides. They say they never intended to suggest that children should not be vaccinated and argue that viewers do not look to fiction for medical information.

But can we really deny that even fictional media–created purely for entertainment–still influence people? After all, isn’t that part of the point of all those fun Super Bowl commercials we will see this Sunday?

Many schools try to keep students moving on conveyor belts to good careers. Sure, kids fight in the corridors at some places, terrorizing teachers and each other, but most affluent suburban schools function without regular incidents of this sort. They generally give students the tools to get ahead, and fill their heads with all kinds of information and propaganda.

And yet, much of what happens in school could be summarized in the title of a book by the late Neal Postman about education and other aspects of popular culture: Amusing Ourselves to Death. Many “good” schools typically get kids thinking about everything except what is truly important: our relationship to God. They try to turn kids into happy chimpanzees, capable and desirous of following the rules, grinning and gobbling down the bananas offered as rewards.

Christian schools that are up against top-flight public schools are likely to lose, because they typically don’t have as many bananas to offer. Christian schools rarely have expensive but well-oiled bureaucracies. They often don’t have the clubs and activities that keep kids busy after school. But they can compete because, apart from learning about God in the context of learning about His creation, all of the bells and whistles are worthless. They may seem pleasant rather than destructive physically, but in the end they are destructive morally and theologically.

Christian schools should teach children to resist superficial happiness, the kind that comes too easily. They should want their graduates to be restless selves rather than diverted selves – to be, as Walker Percy says, dislocated humans rather than happy chimps. They should recognize that a lack of self-esteem can hurt, but unearned self-esteem can hurt even more. They should help students to locate themselves spiritually.

One other thing: Christian schools should teach children that it is good to give and fine to receive. The left wants a world where no one serves anyone else, where people are not dependent on others because they have entitlements from government. But that deprives us of part of our humanity. We begin our lives completely dependent on people. We maintain them with partial dependence. We are always completely dependent on God. Charity and service to others makes us less brutish, more giving. They help us to locate ourselves throughout our lives.

byFaith magazine writes about philosopher and theologian Paul Helm, who “looks at global warming through the lens of Pascal.”

Pascal’s argument was that if the evidence for God’s existence is no stronger than the evidence against, you should wager on the side of faith-that was what seemed reasonable to him,” said Helm. “As a philosopher, I am redeploying Pascal’s wager argument to think about global warming. We should adopt forms of action that are sensible, whether it is determined that mankind is responsible for global warming or not.”

If you go to byFaith, you can see some contrary comments against this kind of thinking, and some for it.  What do you think about “Helm’s wager”?

I received a “special greeting,” only to open it and find about fifty other addressees besides me. Not feeling so “special” anymore, I moved on to the next email.

My assumption, as I reflected on it later, was that love’s intensity is diluted when it’s stretched fifty ways. For the same reason, I would not like to be a Mormon of the old school, and competitor for my husband’s affections.

But then I started thinking of people I know who have loved me well. They have generally been people who loved others well too. There was Marge, who opened her house to many a stray hippie in Hyannis. There was Lyn, who had scores of friends, but took me to Quebec the summer my husband died.

The quality of the love, and not the number of people it alights on, is the thing. I have noticed that if a person has this kind of love, she is able to hold more people in her embrace than another person who is capable of letting in only one or two. My arithmetic was too earthly.

I need to disabuse myself of this prejudice regarding God. I have been thinking He can’t possibly love me well if he is so promiscuous with his affections. But that’s like an ant trying to fathom the sea. “The weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Corinthians 1:25).

What do Hillary Clinton and actress Reese Witherspoon have in common? Well, not much–but you might be amused by how much Witherspoon’s character, Tracy Flick, in Election resembles Clinton. As Slate V drolly illustrates, “Don’t you just hate when some upstart comes along and threatens your best-laid plans?”